lavender+podcast+script

Chaos Blooms
Nathan Whitmore

The Process was vast, ancient, and incomprehensible.

Some people would label it a god, a spirit, or even an alien. Others would ascribe it to randomness. Some would even claim that they could bottle it in a machine and use it to do their bidding.

No one was entirely correct. The Process was intelligent—it solved seemingly unsolvable problems with brilliant woks of art---but not. It could manipulate the smallest details of a protein ,and wipe out a country with plague, but had no goal, no consciousness, nothing directing its intelligence. It could be bottled, but the result was like culturing a human nerve cell—the marvelous complexity that was the Process was lost, reduced to a few scattered fragments.

Right now, a pressing development occupied a tiny sliver of the Process’s intelligence. On a landmass, a population of primitive plants were rapidly dying off. The spores they produced were dangerously exposed to the elements, and even worse, the scorpionflies on which they depended for pollination were becoming extinct. The Process passed no judgment on this, but, with all the passion of a computer program, began to alter the plants DNA. They grew bright flowers that could attract the new pollinators, and small seeds with hard coats that could survive the environment until they found a safe place to germinate.

Eons later, the plight of these plants once again occupied a tiny part of the Process’s attention. It had made, if not a mistake—the Process never made mistakes per se—a decision that was no longer applicable. Its earlier alterations had been too successful. The fertile land was now so crowded with the kind of plant we would call “angiosperms” that they were beginning to starve and die from lack of nutrients. But just a few miles away, vast swaths of land remained uninhabited, rendered inhospitable by the lack of all but a few pitiful inches of rain that fell each year. The Process began to experiment, coaxing the plants into sending out multitudes of seeds to the regions, each seed only slightly different. Most died. But a few had just the right mix of genes—they stored water efficiently, and send out sprawling root systems, and they began to flourish, the first pioneers on a new frontier.

The Process did not have any memory, but a vast expanse of time later, it encountered something it had never seen before. The drought-tolerant angiosperms had populated continents, and had been discovered by a curious type of bipedal, hairless ape, produced only a figurative blink of an eye ago by a far-removed sliver of the Process’s intelligence. Dispassionatley, it began to compute the results of this new interaction. The naked apes were highly intelligent, and they discovered that a particular kind of this plant, which they called “lavender” was very useful. They began to harvest its honey made from its nectar and use it as a food source. An infinitesimal second later, the Process’s iron grip on the lavender was pried away by the strange new type of intelligence of these hairless apes. They had learned the secrets of selection, the fire the drove the Process’s intelligence. But the minds of these apes operated on a scale of microseconds, not eons. And their intelligence was //directed// and conscious—they set long-term goals and planned how to achieve them. So in the relative instant that the apes seized control, they began to analyze and select the lavender plants, moulding them to their agenda. Some, they optimized for aesthetics. Others were bred to provide honey. Still others were bred to harvest the oil they produced, which the apes used as an antiseptic and treatment for many diseases.

Only a few instants later, an amazing variety of organisms had been altered this way, all to boost the success of the apes. But for every species they altered, the Process died a little. Its amazing creativity and resourcefulness was based in the randomness of nature, of living things. But the apes had no interest in randomness. Their directed intelligence ment they had specifications, an optimal state, and when an organism reached that state, there was no reason for it to change. So every genetically identical stalk of corn, every purebred dog, was a red-hot needle stuck into the delicate tissue of the Process’s brain.

Now weak, feeble, and slow-minded, the process realized something. Lacking memory, it could not recall the time when deserts had limited the spread of its plants, It still was not aware. It couldn’t recognize adversary, or its own feeble state. But one tiny, but relatively untouched part of its diminished mind saw opportunity, not unlike that period when the angiosperms had colonized the deserts.

The apes would call the twelve-year period that followed the “Monoculture Holocaust”. Virus and bacteria devoured swaths of identical corn, wheat, pigs, cows, dogs. Their lightning-fast consciousness tackled the problem immediately, of course, but in the microscopic world the Process still held an advantage in speed. Its aimless creativity evaded all the vaccines and antivirals, and sowed seeds of randomness in huge plots that had long since been dead to the Process. In the blink of an eye, its strength came rushing back.

The apes, on the other hand, dwindled out to extinction. With their best weapon, standardization, turned against them, they failed to adapt. It was, in many ways, like the removal of a tumor from the Process, a particular path of adaptation that had brought its host to its knees. But the Process remained indifferent, silently, unknowingly watching over a world where chaos bloomed.