Tomrob stared at the corpse flower. It was sickeningly stunning. It was disgustingly delightful. This enormous flower was about eight feet tall, but in truth it really wasn’t horrible until it opened. He thought it looked a little like an umbrella being eaten by a giant mop, not like a giant penis as his friend Surbob had suggested. He had even named the flower Malakai. He looked at the calendar.

“Any day now,” he said to himself.

He put his nose close to the flower, but he was in truth a little afraid it might suddenly open and lunge at him like something out of Little Shop of Horrors. There was no smell.

“How many more days?” he questioned.

He looked back at the calendar, counting squares.

“It shoulda bloomed a week ago.”

“Damn flower,” he said, spitting at the ground.

Once the giant flower bloomed, he would open all the windows to his greenhouse, and it would produce such a stink that bugs would come from miles around. Dung beetles and cockroaches and house flies, oh my. Tomrob would then entrap them with a device he used that was like a vacuum. From there he’d transfer them to their proper farm. He had a worm farm, which he kept mostly for fertilizer. He had a maggot farm that he used for protein. He also had a roach farm, but I’ll spare you the details of what he did with them; suffice it to say, cockroach milk is very nutritious. He even had a beetle farm.

Tomrob, the dust bowl farmer, had been in the fields inspecting the latest crop when he saw the meteorite start to enter the atmosphere. The crop was small and uneventful, the meteorite spectacular, unlike any falling star he had ever seen. It burned bright green as it sped toward Earth, leaving a trail behind it. He thought about reporting it, but it was probably just another flying shit bomb dropped from one of those flying machines. Tomrob sighed. He limped to the shed and started the solar dune buggy that moved about 20 feet per minute. He honestly could have walked faster, but seeing how he hobbled instead of walked, he stayed in the buggy. He was on his way to the watermelon fields. Tomrob remembered as a kid eating watermelon and spitting out the black seeds. There were dozens in each slice. He remembered that when he was a child, all fruit had seeds, except maybe those seedless grapes. The purple grapes had seeds, but the green ones didn’t. He remembered a teacher had shown him that if you put a seed into dirt, a new plant would grow. How marvelous an idea that had been to him then and even more so now. A seed could spring up and bring forth new life. It was miraculous. He remembered people had such little respect for seeds they would just spit them onto the sidewalk or onto the ground. They wouldn’t be as foolish today. Of course, it was entirely odd to Tomrob, and perhaps no one else, that now watermelons had no seeds. Not one. Real Earth Foods had seen to it, after genetically modifying the watermelon plant to be hardier, that it produce no offspring. They were like a botanical Frankenstein.  

                As Tomrob got to the watermelon field, he could see a giant hole in the earth where the meteorite had smashed into the ground. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt the crop; that might cost him several credits. On his dune buggy that traveled at the speed of sloth, he inspected the hole the meteorite had made. It appeared there were also some remains of what had burned up in the atmosphere. Was it frozen shit or a space rock? Tomrob wasn’t sure he knew the difference. Against his better judgment, he plopped the rock in the back of his dune buggy and headed back to the farm. He was making his way past the cabbage patch when the rock started beeping and letting forth a smoky steam. He stopped the dune buggy and began to examine the unidentified object; he hoped it wasn’t some sort of unexploded ordnance. It appeared to have a fissure and was splitting down the middle like an enormous egg. The idea brought fantastic horrors to Tomrob’s mind of alien species burrowing their way into one’s intestines to lay eggs. Tomrob kicked the space rock out of his slow-moving vehicle and tried to forget about it for the time being.

                At dawn, he went about his daily chores, tending to the worm farm, watering the plants. He had no pigs, chickens, or cows; they had all gone extinct, the way of the dodo. The plants looked like they always did, as if they were about to keel over and die. All plants looked like that because the air quality on Earth was very poor in what was often referred to as the dust bowl. Tomrob sneaked a cherry. He remembered how cherries used to have pits; he had eaten hundreds of them, spitting the pits into a napkin or bowl. Never once in all those years did he decide to use a pit to plant another cherry tree. He wished he had. As Tomrob bit into the cherry, he also wished he would discover it had a pit again but had no such luck.

                Later at the watering hole, while sipping on fermented waste, he told his friend Surbob about the meteorite. Surbob shrugged; meteorites were not out of the ordinary. One might see two or three in a night, and many would strike the Earth. A large one had destroyed part of lower Asia and had thrown the economy and environment into chaos.

                “Boring,” replied Surbob. “Me second cousin was struck by a falling meteorite…came screaming out of da sky…shoulda killed her, yet she only lost one leg.”

Tomrob changed the subject. “Once I thought I found a tomato seed.”

                Surbob, a portly fellow, was slightly intrigued. “Really, a tamater seed?”

                “Turned out it was just pulp.”

                Surbob looked at him harshly. “Man, seeds ain’t even real, dey a myth.”

“Why you so obsessed wit da idea of seeds?” Surbob questioned.

                “I remember ’em,” Tomrob explained.

“You don’t?” Tomrob questioned.

“Nope,” said Surbob.

Tomrob wondered why everyone else didn’t remember fruits or vegetables with seeds. Maybe they have been brainwashed by Real Earth Foods, he thought. Perhaps the government had put something into the water, but that still didn’t explain why he remembered. His mom had done something that today humans would find extraordinary; she had taken the pit of an avocado and stuck two toothpicks into it. She had then placed the avocado into a clear glass of water. As the days and weeks went by, the avocado began to sprout roots, and then eventually, a small stem and leaves. How come no one else has these memories? he wondered.

                The evening news announced that the value of credits would once again drop, and people had to suddenly stop drinking their fermented waste realizing it would be necessary to cut back even more just to be able to afford synthetic meat. Tomrob wondered who had made it this way. Real Earth Foods was a powerful corporation; as far as Tomrob could figure, they were to blame. Tomrob booted up his old dusty computer, hoping it would still work. It made weird clicking sounds, but still worked. He hoped he could log on to the INTER-NET and try to find the history of how fruits and vegetables had become seedless. He was able to log on but could find nothing about genetic seed modification or a conspiracy by Real Earth Foods to patent seeds. He fell asleep in front of the warm machine giving off its ghostly glow.

Within a few days, the news spread that Surbob would be losing his farm. Tomrob felt a fear grip him unlike anything he had ever felt. He couldn’t believe it. Surbob was going under, unable to pay the bills. He would literally have to move underground. They threw Surbob a going away party, but everyone knew he was going under. It wasn’t really a celebration. At the party the faces were glum, even more so because many of the dust bowl farmers knew they would be following Surbob underground if things didn’t change. During the cutting of the cake, a woman named Donnasue cried her eyes out, and everyone left early.

Malakai, the corpse flower, still hadn’t bloomed and Tomrob was feeling angry. When the Real Earth Foods plant truck came around, Tomrob began questioning where the plants came from. Why couldn’t they grow their own plants?

“Pal, I just work here,” the driver of the truck explained.

“Do they come from seeds?” Tomrob asked.

“What’s a seed? I don’t know what you mean,” the driver answered, puzzled.

“Well, I mean, how do you grow a new plant? They gotta come from somewhere?” Tomrob questioned.

“They come from one of the bigger plants,” the driver answered simply.

“But how?” Tomrob asked.

“They like pull it off…from like the roots…I don’t know…scientists do it in laboratorial facilities.” The driver looked nervous.

Tomrob knew that his statement was absolute bullshit. Although bulls were technically extinct.

“You ask too many questions,” the driver said, shaking his head. He touched a screen on his clipboard and started typing something in.

“How’s the crop?” the driver asked.

“Terrible,” Tomrob admitted.

“That’s what I hear.” The driver drove off in his armored vehicle.

That night Tomrob had a dream that from the space rock sprang forth a mighty plant the likes of which this planet had never seen. It was towering and gave off an odor that was abrasive. In the dream Tomrob thought the plant spoke to him. He thought the plant told him, “For every want and need, there is a pit or seed.” He awoke sweating; the wind was howling, clawing at the side door. The dust whipped up from this storm would make farming nearly impossible tomorrow.

                He woke up to a black dawn; the wind had caused a dust storm, and it was barely visible outside. Tomrob wandered around the outskirts of the farm, trying to tie down what crops he could before they were blown away. He wandered farther than he should have and discovered a forest of growth in what had previously been a field of withering strawberries. He couldn’t figure out where the growth had come from, and there were plants he couldn’t even identify. He grabbed a lantern and began to explore the strange new growth. It started at the side of the road and expanded down into about half the field where those abysmal strawberries were growing. The meek strawberry plants had practically been choked out by what were already stronger and larger plants. As Tomrob weaved through the brush of plants, bushes, and small shrubs, some of which he didn’t know the name, he moved closer to the source of all this. He stopped cold, almost dropping the lantern. He had caused this. He had caused it when he kicked that thing from his vehicle. The source of all this strange growth was the space rock.

                As Tomrob moved closer, he could see the space rock had split in two; inside there were lights, wires, and circuits. The space rock appeared to be a contraption. Tomrob nervously poked the space rock with a stick, afraid it might have some sort of defense mechanism. When enough time had elasped to assure Tomrob that there was no tripwire or boobytraps, he began to inspect the device. Other than the fact that it was a complicated piece of machinery, Tomrob could ascertain very little from his inspection. The dust whipping around made visibility low. He could see that there was the word Gottlieb engraved on the inside of the device. Gottlieb, now where had he heard that name before? He gathered up what was left of the space rock and brought it into his small greenhouse.

                Inside, away from the wind and dust, he could see the space rock had dozens of little compartments. After opening a few, he realized that inside each one were round little objects, some flat, some circular. To be clear, he knew what they were, but he thought he was dreaming. Was he asleep, recalling a memory? He didn’t think so. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, as the greenhouse was rather humid.  He would have to log on to the INTER-NET later and look up this Gottlieb fellow. He placed some of the seeds in soil. He had no idea what type of seeds they were, since they weren’t labeled, but he had a feeling they would sprout something almost as amazing as Jack’s famous beanstalk from the fairy tales. There was one compartment with a label. There were only two seeds in it. The label did not tell what the seeds were, it simply said Do Not Plant or Ingest Under Any Circumstances. Tomrob thought the label to be asinine. What was the point of having the seeds if you weren’t going to plant them? Still, he wondered what would happen if he ingested one.

                He worked in secrecy, though he really had nothing to worry about since the nearest farm was over a mile down the dusty road. He hid many of the seeds in an underground chamber below the greenhouse; he understood their importance in the scheme of things. Later when he had successfully separated all the seeds and did his best to put them into categories by shape and size, he finally had a chance to look up the word Gottlieb. In German it literally meant God’s love. Dr. Gottlieb had been a famous scientist over a century ago right before the extinction event. He won the Nobel Peace Prize and was considered the brightest mind of his generation. Dr. Gottlieb had discovered a way to prolong life or avoid death. The history was a little confusing and contradicted itself several times, but Real Earth Foods had essentially started to genetically mutate the DNA of plants. They claimed they were trying to make the plants hardier and better for consumption, but in the process were basically putting a copyright on each plant. The new genetically enhanced plants could only be produced by Real Earth Foods in a laboratory, as they did not produce their own seeds. When Dr. Gottlieb discovered what they were doing, he put together an ark of sorts and launched it into the Earth’s atmosphere. The ark was supposedly a complete inventory of seeds of all the Earth’s plants. Had Tomrob just found Dr. Gottlieb’s lost ark? It seemed possible, nay probable. He read on and learned of a strange mutant plant called the jelly fruit and its age-altering properties. From what Tomrob could gather, the jelly fruit basically turned all the cells in one’s body into stem cells, allowing the body to function differently, but essentially allowing one to live many times longer than a normal human. One thousand years was the estimate. He turned off the warm machine.

It took him less than another half hour to ingest the jelly fruit seed, the only seed with specific instructions, Do Not Plant or Ingest Under Any Circumstances. The result was mind-boggling; music was numbers, and the world was a rainbow of color and light. He stepped outside of himself. It was true there was another realm, many realms or dimensions where time was inconsequential. He was aware of so much more and really wasn’t himself anymore. He didn’t know where he was or who he was. He was a pan-dimensional being. It was as if he wasn’t attached to his body. He awoke twenty years later in a prison cell.

He awoke to the reality that he was an enemy of the state for harboring dangerous biological weapons. The media were referring to Tomrob as a terrorist. His term was life imprisonment. He gulped. How long did the jelly fruit make you live? Dr. Gottlieb had said a thousand years. He might be in here awhile. He surmised society would more likely disintegrate before the effects of the jelly fruit wore off. He went before the parole board. They wouldn’t even listen to him. He tried to communicate with many of his friends or acquaintances from the dust bowl, but most had either gone under or died. Twenty years was a long time; the world had changed. He could watch the evening news, but he wasn’t sure the evening news portrayed the world as it was, or how they wanted you to see it.

Soon, as expected, society crumbled and Tomrob watched as people in the prison stopped coming to work and then, even more horrifically, as everyone in the prison slowly died one by one until it was he alone left in a locked cell. The scariest part was that he no longer aged. There was something about the jelly fruit that sustained his life, so he didn’t need to eat or sleep. He sat in that cell for something like 10,668 days, a little more than 29 years. Through the magic of the jelly fruit, he was able to play a symphony in his head, hell, he could watch the Chicago Philharmonic live. Well, not exactly live, but it might as well have been. The experience was as real as anything else he had experienced. He went to a Cardinals baseball game; he ordered a beer, peanuts, and a hotdog. He hadn’t eaten a hotdog in 66 years. He even felt slightly inebriated. Still the time went slowly. It felt as if lifetimes passed him by in that cell (a weaker man would have gone insane), before a tremor in the Earth’s crust caused some of the prison to collapse.

Tomrob was eventually able to break through the ceiling of his cell and escape to freedom. The world was on fire amid global chaos. Tomrob’s first thoughts were of his abandoned farm and Dr. Gottlieb’s ark of God’s love. Unfortunately, over the last half century ecological disaster had brought drought and famine that turned the dust bowl into the Great American Desert. It was nearly the size of the Sahara in Africa, or so he was told. Tomrob’s farm was gone, wiped off the face of the planet. He waded through the sand for miles until he was picked up by an odd flying machine called a helicopter. The helicopter circled over the remains of what was the closest town to Tomrob’s. He pleaded with the pilot to land and drop him off, but he said he had strict orders. Tomrob was forced to fly many miles to a military base in what was once the great state of Texas. California and Texas had seceded from the US in the 2030’s.

After several months of odd jobs around the base, he was finally able to arrange a ride back to his town in the middle of the Great American Desert. Some scouts were going on a mission, and they were going to drop him there for a couple of days. He wasn’t sure when they’d be able to pick him up. He guessed never; he didn’t care. So be it. Flying in the strange helicopter, from above he could see that there were very few discernible landmarks of what Farmington had once been. Yes, his town was named Farmington; the founder had apparently attended a public school. Tomrob was able to make out the remains of an abandoned silo that had been on the edge of town close to Dayton’s Hardware Store. It wasn’t really a desert, at least not yet, more of a Great Plains of brush, sand, and dust.  He had to find the greenhouse and the seeds he had hidden. He knew they would be worth many times their weight in gold. Or perhaps just a piece of gold. He was disturbed to learn that gold was priceless in that all the gold and lead had been mined from the planet by aliens while he had spent 29 years locked in that cell.

The drop-off was quick, and they did not specify when they’d return. Tomrob didn’t care. He had rations, tools, supplies, and he was quite certain he could find the remains of his greenhouse. The ground was covered with a thick layer of dust, and the air had a miasma of particles swirling around that made it difficult to see. He stopped at the remains of a farm he knew to have belonged to a man named Petemaw. The farm had obviously gone under many years ago, but there was a small shed still standing. Tomrob huddled inside trying to find his bearings. He was only about fourteen miles southeast of his farm. It would be a terrible journey, but if he found even a few seeds, he knew it would be worth it.

He set off with the wind whipping in his face. Although it was the middle of the day, it was dark. The sun was blocked out by a blanket of dust and sand which covered the ground like a fog. Tomrob wore a shirt on top of his head, which acted like a turban of sorts. He had traveled no less than twenty minutes when he heard a howl off in the distance. He wondered what kind of animals were out in this haze. He had a weapon just in case; he gripped the blade in his pocket. The land was desolate, and there were very few plants alive. There was a desiccated cactus here or a withered brown shrub there, but Tomrob wondered how any animal survived out here. He passed a dry river bed and thought about digging for water, but he had his rations. He wandered mile after mile seeing nary a living organism. But less than a mile from his farmhouse, that began to change. At first it was just a shrub here or a bush there, but it was becoming extremely obvious he was seeing more and more plant life. And what was stranger, as he moved forward, the air seemed to be getting cleaner and more like the planet he had remembered as a kid. He didn’t understand what was going on.

As visibility returned, he could see on the horizon what appeared to be an oasis in the middle of the Great American Desert. It was his farm. Was he imagining things? He didn’t think so. He removed the shirt from on top of his head. Had the seeds caused this? It seemed impossible. Were they magic seeds? Perhaps, Real Earth Foods’ genetic modification had made the plants weaker instead of hardier. He quickened his pace in the hope of finding out.

As he got closer, he broke into a run. He was sprinting toward the greenhouse which appeared to be the epicenter of the oasis. As he got to the entrance, he could see that all the windows in the ceiling of the greenhouse had shattered, but he was relieved to see there were still plants growing inside. The door was hard to open which made him feel good. No one had been in there in a long time. His corpse flower, Malakai, was dead. He checked the underground chamber where he had hidden the seeds and was astonished to find they were gone. He stumbled around the ruins of his greenhouse before finally falling asleep from exhaustion.

When he awoke, the wind had died down and he could think more clearly. It seemed to him he didn’t need the seeds. He walked around the oasis. There were apples and a strange cactus fruit. There were dozens of other plants he couldn’t identify. He picked an apple feeling slightly like Eve, as if someone was watching him. As he bit into the crisp apple he was afraid to look. He shut his eyes tightly and enjoyed the tart taste. As he opened his eyes slowly, he was hesitant to look. As his eyes came in focus he was staring at an apple. There were no seeds inside. He grimaced. He was about to throw the apple away, when he remembered from his childhood that apple seeds usually were at the center of the apple at the core. He bit into the apple again and again, spitting out the fruit he could not eat. As he hit the middle, he dropped to his knees. He screamed out for joy.

“There are seeds…There are seeds…There are seeds!!!”

He gathered the seeds in a sack. Then he went around and collected the seeds of all the other types of fruit that he could find. It took him many months to gather every specimen of seed he could from the oasis. He almost didn’t make it out alive.

Back in what was left of society, people offered him riches and the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars for the seeds, but he refused to sell them. Besides, he could produce dozens more with every fruit or vegetable grown. He started a farm with the intention of changing the world back to a place where people are free to grow as many plants as they want, and seeds are so plentiful you spit them out right on the road.