"Flora? Yes, though honestly they sound fake."

"I don't, what the hell are you talking about? Original recipe plants? Flora???"

"They're not fake. The ships used to have them. ...there's a place here on Gunsmoke that has them but it's secret and not my secret so I can't actually tell you guys myself."

".... Can you blindfold me and take me there and let me shake down the residents for their secrets. Please."

"I'll have to ask my friend who's responsible for the place but I think he'd be thrilled to have a plant engineer there." And maybe Zash could leave her there, it's the safest place in the world and she'd be able to do meaningful contributions to humanity at large from there... Food for thought.

"Is this the same friend who made your arm. Is there just a secret base of this one guy who has been sitting on a bunch of revolutionary things that could change the entire world? Because he'd better have some damn good reasons or I might punch him."

"Aww! Look, Zash, she's learning violence!! I'm so proud. Now will one of you explain the not-plant plants to me, here. This is confusing terminology, can I call them flora instead."

"He does have good reasons," Zash agrees, "and yes you can," to Morgan. "I've heard them called geoplants, too, literally 'plants from Earth'.

"Which is sort of what they are. They're a native life form from Old Earth which takes many forms." He can project some psychic impressions of the ones Zash has seen in the arcologies, grass and trees and flowers. They're not proper mental images, more like afterimages, but good enough to be getting on with. "They absorb sunlight and use that plus water from the ground to grow and generate nutrients. Some of them were edible to humans, and there were animals on Old Earth who could eat the kinds that weren't edible and then humans would eat those animals, too.

"Before humanity discovered plants, geoplants were the main source of nutrition for nearly everything on the planet."

"Wild. Flora's easier to say, though, I'll go with that."

"Are you going to explain the good reasons to me, Zash. Or are you just going to say 'He'll tell you' and then watch as I am slowly overcome with curiosity until my head bursts."

"You know, I was going to tell you, but maybe not telling you would be a lot funnier."

"Well, that's settled then. I'm selling you off for your bounty, that is clearly the only logical and proportional response to this."

He laughs and shakes his head. "His reasons are mostly practical. The arm," and he stretches it out and flexes his fingers, "is somewhat based on plant research by..."

"...uh, by Dr. Conrad. On Tesla." He winces. "I don't think it's very straightforwardly usable by humans, I think, uh, Rollo might be the current state of the art of his research on human cybernetics."

"Oh. I guess it would make sense to rely on your bullshit biology, wouldn't it, since it's your prosthetic. ... That's very sweet, though, that someone specifically researched how to make a functioning prosthetic for you based on your unique physiology. I mean, the research scales less well for everyone else, but. Very sweet."

"Yeah. Brad is very cool."

"As for the geoplants, if you don't already have soil with the right nutrients and the kinds of weather patterns that can support them, they die very easily. If you transplant a sufficiently large area of them somewhere they can make the weather that supports them, but it's extremely expensive and requires a lot of complex infrastructure to set up. —which Brad is doing, to be clear, he's spent the last hundred and fifty years working on scaling that up because in the long term it would be to everyone's benefit if the entire planet were covered in vegetation like Old Earth was, before.

"It was part of the original SEEDS project, to—the verb they use is 'terraform', which literally means 'shape into Earth'—to terraform Gunsmoke so that it could support its own flora. February wanted to do that. But most of it was lost either on the crash or shortly after, and as far as I know Brad's is the only arcology with flora that exists, here. If anything happens to it—well, it'd be possible to use plants to recreate one, eventually, but very expensive. It's a long-term project."

"All a lot of power held by one guy, are we sure we shouldn't be calling Brad God?"

Zash grins. "It's not just him, he has a whole team, he's just the team's leader. It was Luida, before, but." (Nai killed her.)

"Gotcha. I wouldn't have called him God anyway. It just would have been kinda funny."

"... Zash, have you been quietly planning to take me there and introduce me and see if I'll stop following you around if you give me something meaningful and useful to do?"

"Not explicitly. Not until five minutes ago."

"Oh I see. ... Well. I'm definitely curious, and it'd depend on their mechanisms for acquiring and disseminating information, and probably I'll still want to go out into the world and directly help plants and get data, but. Something could maybe be worked out. I am not... entirely against the idea."

"Gotten sick of being out here in the wastes already?"

"That's not... I mean, I can't say it's fun living out of a car in a desert of sand and hyper-violence, but it's not really about my comfort? I said I want to improve the world and I meant it. If the best way to do that is to continue being a rogue plant engineer with a car and a dream and heaps of data, marching up to each and every plant that has gone red and helping to save it, then that's what I'll do. But more important than me is the overall field of knowledge itself, and if there's a, a secret arcology of super scientists who are sitting on half of the lost knowledge of the ancients then, uh, yes I would like to knock on their door and get a look at their notes and yell at them if they're being stupid. And help, if I can."