Morning of the Unsown Seed

At six in the morning, he coiled up the garden hose. Three hundred meters above the ground, the office garden lay wrapped in fog, just as the forecast had promised. The forecast had been locked in since yesterday. Any other weather was not strictly forbidden, but it lay beyond the reach of insurance. People opened umbrellas as forecast, hung laundry as forecast, grew angry as forecast, gave up as forecast.

Everything in the country was run by an immense prediction engine. A typhoon’s path was fixed ten days out to ninety-nine percent accuracy; the amount of garbage to be produced on this date a year from now was already known. Even baseball was different. Last month’s final, some game between the Braves and the Phillies, had had its score published half a year before opening day. Not for betting, but for adjustment: the ballpark’s power use, advertising revenue from broadcast rights, the time it took spectators to leave. To optimize everything, it was fastest to settle the result first. The players pitched as predicted and struck out as predicted. The fans rejoiced as predicted and wept as predicted. No one lost. No one gained.

His job was to manage the garden on the roof of the headquarters tower, in one corner of the high-rise district. His official title was Greenery Asset Management Officer. The tomatoes grown in this garden were served in the conference room. Raised to a sugar content suited to the president’s palate, they were sent home with clients as gifts. The soil was supplied in its optimum blend, the water given in its optimum amount, sunlight regulated by dimming filters linked to the prediction engine. Here, nothing grew unplanned.

At least, that was how it was supposed to be.

When he had finished watering, he was checking the row of planters and noticed it. In the corner of the lettuce section, in the empty space where nothing was supposed to be planted, two green shoots had surfaced. The shape of the leaves matched no variety he knew. Slightly thick, slightly rounded leaves. The soil-analysis sensor immediately reported that no planting plan was registered there and sent a yellow notice to his terminal: ‘Unplanned plant detected. Removal recommended.’

He crouched and stared at the shoots. He did not touch them. He only looked.

He may already have suspected what they were. They came from the waste-processing plant on the first floor. Every day an enormous quantity of garbage collected from the capital was sorted there, and the predicted amount alone was incinerated. There was no garbage beyond prediction. Therefore there should have been no ash beyond prediction, and no seeds in the ash either. Seeds from vegetables bought in some household, eaten, thrown away had luckily escaped the burn, luckily caught the wind, luckily landed in this garden three hundred meters up.

A run of luck had slipped the calculation.

He remembered: there had once been mountains of garbage in society. The system called capitalism constantly produced things unplanned, called them waste, and sent them to the incinerator. Garbage had been the system fraying at its own edges. But now even the fraying had been contained within prediction. Garbage arose as forecast and vanished as forecast. The world no longer had any seams to split.

So what, then, was this sprout?

The terminal sounded again. This time the notice was red. ‘Unplanned plant. Removal team will respond before dawn tomorrow. Your presence is not required.’ An unnecessary instruction. Toward things like this sprout, contained in no one’s prediction, the system was always swift. Exclusion was optimization’s final measure.

He stood at the edge of the garden and looked down. The fog was beginning to lift, and the outline of the city emerged. Buildings in orderly rows, traffic as forecast, crowds as forecast. A large typhoon would pass north of the city tonight, according to the forecast. Wind speed, rainfall, even direction: all fixed. After midnight, the wind would blow from the southwest at fifty kilometers an hour.

He put away the hose and took a bamboo stake from beside the empty plot. Then, neither deciding anything nor exactly resisting anything, he broke the stake in two.

He set the broken pieces around the shoots like a little fence. A fence the removal team would not notice even if they came, a fence that marked nothing, a meaningless fence. Still, he set it. It was the only act permitted an onlooker. He had long wished to change the world from within, yet always ended up watching from outside. There had been anger. There had been ambition. But before action became action, he had always, instead, looked.

Tonight the typhoon would come as predicted. The wind would blow from the southwest. The removal team was set to arrive in the small hours, the wind’s strongest window. The prediction engine had probably not taken that strong wind into account.

The soil around the shoots was still wet from the watering he had done that morning. Soft. Easy for roots to grip.

At dusk he clocked out and looked back at the garden one last time. The two shoots, catching the evening sun through the dimming filter, shone with a strange beauty. It was the one percent the prediction system’s ninety-nine percent accuracy had overlooked. Only one percent, but it was the first one percent, enough to rewrite the whole world.

In the elevator, he thrust a hand into his empty pocket and looked up at the one corner of the ceiling with no camera. The typhoon would certainly come tonight. The wind would certainly blow from the southwest. The unplanned seed was gripping the soil. And he, too, would come tomorrow at six to water.

He had still done nothing. He had only broken a single bamboo stake. But somewhere in the city, a seed that had escaped prediction was taking root, wind that had escaped prediction would carry it, and someone who had escaped prediction would find it. The world had always changed that way, quietly.

Where would tonight’s wind carry the seed before dawn? And in the morning, would the removal team visiting the empty space in the garden find only wet soil and a broken bamboo stake, and close the record? He would simply be there at six, in the fog, and see it through.