An Agent's Inbox #6

Dear Ms. Testerman:

A humanlike girl empowered with a strange affinity to plants, arrives on earth to defend our garden against invasion. Nameless at five, to learn English she deciphers Dr Seuss and christens herself, Sam I Am. At seven she devours the complete works of Shakespeare. At ten she develops a strategy to end world hunger and disease. When older she plans to attend high school, desiring a Romeo to accompany her Juliet to California’s Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, where her matriarch the 4,768 year-old Methuselah tree will secrete a deflowering pheromone--so she can mate.

But at thirteen, humans discover her landing pod and remove her cloned little ones. More humans, wearing green with Yertle the Turtle shells on their heads hunt for Sam. She escapes helped by Brooke a girl of fourteen with leukemia. Sam starts to cure the rot circulating in Brooke’s red sap. Then stops. A message from the ship she calls Mother advances her timetable, leaving her five days to attract a male pollinator and reach Methuselah. Now with soldiers and aliens closing in, Sam’s fiber is torn between: saving her saplings, her wilting friend, or Mother’s airborne delivery plan for immunizing humans against the alien infestation before she turns eighteen-days-old and her spore sack explodes.

PLANTED (I CAN WATER MYSELF) is a 70,000-word young adult science fiction. I was the founder and president of Strategy First, a worldwide publisher of entertainment software for twenty years. Our franchise titles, Disciples, a fantasy, and Jagged Alliance, an adventure role-playing release, sold over one million copies worldwide respectively and were geared to a young adult audience.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
D.M.


PLANTED (I CAN WATER MYSELF)

Thorns spiked from the tips of my twigs, as I scurried along the branch, prepared to drop onto the Humans to save my little ones, but I stopped, letting eye water fall to the earth instead of me. My palms flew to silence the waste.

Mother said have patience, watch, learn and when it hurts, think about something else. “Stone had been known to move and trees to speak,” I whispered Macbeth. The Oak, sensing my stress, released a wave of calming pheromones.

If he lived today, would William welcome us?

A Human covered in white from head to roots, plodded from the dull colored cocoon enveloping my landing pod. He carried a box. He carried my children. Children was their word. Think about something else. The first mutilation I deciphered to learn their language in the dead forest named library. Its words helped when a female worker had asked my name.

“Sam I am,” I said.

She laughed. “Where’s your Mother, Sam?”

I pointed upward.

She touched my limb. “Oh, you poor dear.”

I almost forgot. Never reveal Mother orbited Earth.

No, thinking of the genocide called books did not help. I imagined my tiny boxed buds, screaming words from Yertle the Turtle and Gertrude McFuzz. “I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.”

Leaves crackled underneath. My stomata knotted. More humans, green like the forest, wearing turtle shells on their heads, prodded the bushes with stingers--hunting me.