on: April 21, 2022, 03:08:25 PM
PseudoPod 806 : Garden EmpireAuthor:
Christopher MatsonNarrator:
Dan RabartsHost:
Scott CampbellAudio Producer:
Marty PerrettPseudoPod 806 : Garden Empire is a PseudoPod original.
Content Warning:
I’d bought the house only the week before, when I was still in possession both of my teeth and of my job as the Head of Machine Learning for an Auckland-based startup. A two-story villa with a section of native bush so dense that it baffled the city noise into a murmur.
After David called to tell me I was being pushed out, I wandered in a daze out of the house and into the cool heart of the garden, where I slumped against a tree fern and watched a bumblebee clamber about a lavender bush. Its bulbous shape evoked the image of a furred twitching brain – my brain, I idly imagined, always seeking nutritious data. But where would it feed if the lavender sickened? Would it throb unhappily to a dark corner of the garden, to dine on sullen fungal growths or the entrails of a dead mouse? My mind’s eye would not hold the bee’s gentle fur in the same scope as a rodent’s cadaver, and the bee flickered into a fat black fly, and the fly multiplied into a swarm. Bees, entrails, flies … Mother had often warned me to be on guard against unhealthy mental progressions, and I realized that without a job I would need something appropriate to occupy my teeming mind.
I needed a hobby.
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I'd like to hear my options, so I could weigh them, what do you say?
Five pounds? Six pounds? Seven pounds?