Flora raised the glass to her lips, but the server who was dropping off the glasses caught her and whispered, “Not just yet, Apprentice! Wait for the toasting.” Flora sheepishly lowered the glass. But then she heard a ringing. Everywhere, people were picking up their glasses and tapping them with forks and knives. A single woman stepped out of the crowd of green-scarved scholars. She was a stout, round woman with short gray hair and rosy cheeks. She wore the standard white scholar’s robe, but her scarf was decadent. It was embroidered with intricate gold patterns and looked extremely thick and heavy, flowing from her shoulders all the way down to her ankles. Despite her height, she commanded great presence, silencing the crowd with a single motion of her arm.
She stepped towards Flora’s table and lifted her glass. “I am Eleanor Devindry, head of the the Department of Agriculture. On behalf of my department, I welcome you to our halls. May you bring good fortune to the Institute.” At this point all the green-scarved scholars behind her raised their glasses as well. “Three cheers she called.”
The crowd behind her responded, “Hi, hi, hooooooo.” Then everyone drank. Flora looked at the others beside her. She exchanged looks with Aster across the table and then both grabbed their glasses and drank. The wine tasted surprisingly sweet and seemed to lift away her anxiousness. Flora noticed Bunsen pouring a little wine into the potted plant that he always carried with him. How could he waste it?
“What?” Bunsen asked when he caught Flora staring at him. “Bonsai here wanted to try some.” Flora was about to get Mendel’s attention to get his reaction when she was distracted by another round of ringing glasses.
She turned to see a bearded man with black wavy hair and dark chocolate skin stand up. He wore an elaborate blue scarf similar to Eleanor’s. “My name is Jahul Nerdu,” he declared, thrusting his glass towards them. “As head of the Department of Tools, I welcome our new apprentices. Here’s to your future accomplishments and hard work.”
“Hard work!” the crowd behind him echoed.
Flora and the rest of the new apprentices took another sip. Aster cried, “To hard work.”
Next, a surprisingly young looking woman stood up. She had long, flowing golden hair and a delicate frame. Her large blue eyes looked even larger beneath a pair of over-sized glasses that were perched on her elfin nose. The yellow scarf wrapped around her neck looked especially large on her tiny body. “I speak for the Department of Mathematics,” she said softly. Flora could barely hear her, and she sat just a few feet away. “My name is Mishna Vahn, and I welcome you to the Institute. May you always seek truth and beauty.” The crowd mumbled their response as many couldn’t hear what Mishna Vahn had said. All the same, everyone drank.
Flora was already starting to feel the effects of the wine when the next department head stood up. The crowd started chanting even before he spoke. “Ro-mu-lus. Ro-mu-lus”. Flora couldn’t help but stare. Romulus was undeniably handsome. He was maybe thirty-five years old and clearly in excellent shape. Bright blue eyes stood in contrast to his dark brown hair and brought attention to his classically square jaw. He moved with a quiet strength and confidence that was mesmerizing. He wore his bright crimson scarf over one shoulder in a diagonal across his body, the ends connected to form a looped banner.
“I am Morgan Romulus,” he spoke with a booming voice. “I am the head of the Department of Governance and Security, and humble servant to the Institute.” His gleaming smile lit up the room, and the crowd behind him resumed its chanting. Romulus raised his hand to quiet the crowd. “I am here today to offer a toast to our newest members. May you find your place here at the Institute and always guard and protect our society. To guard and protect.”
“To guard and protect,” repeated the crowd.
Finally, the fifth, and final head of the Institute stood up. Flora was surprised to see the ancient scholar who had led them into the mountainside. His scholar robe looked somehow whiter and grander now. There was a faint texture to the robe, as if it was made completely from embroidered white thread. Around his neck, he wore a fantastically ornate black scarf with silver trim and embroidery. Flora’s eyes were drawn immediately to an iridescent crystal pendant hanging around his neck. The pendant seemed to shift color in the light, one moment green and the next purple.
The elderly scholar did not raise a glass. He simply spoke with a deep, steady voice. “I am Aggasiz Sagerius, head of the Department of History, Keeper of the Faith, and Grandmaster of the Institute.” Grandmaster Sagerius stopped to look each of them in the eye. He sat down suddenly and started drinking from his glass. A young scholar seated next to him whispered urgently into his ear, but Sagerius waved him off.
Instead, Romulus stood up. “I will go ahead and speak for the venerable Grandmaster. You have worked hard and traveled far to be here. But your journey has just begun. For the next two weeks, you will stay with your cohort and learn the ways of the Institute from the heads of each of the five departments.” He gestured to the other heads who were still standing. “Learn the basics well, and work hard, for at the end of your introductory period, you will be assigned to a department based on your abilities. It is only then that you will truly be an apprentice.”
Sagerius suddenly stood up, raised his glass up high and spoke. “Long live prosperity.” Everyone stood in silence. Then the young scholar next to Sagerius took up his glass.
“To prosperity,” he called out.
“To prosperity!” they all repeated.
At this last toast, the meadow was suddenly filled with a frenzy of activity. A band appeared and started playing as the scholars moved all the chairs and tables off to the side. As the sun had already set, Flora found it hard to see everything that was happening. The rest of the night flew by like a dream. She sang and she danced. Bunsen and Mendel toasted each other though much of the wine went to Bonsai. Both Aster and Kava seemed to do a lot of giggling. And at one point, she remembered Garland’s hand on hers and twirling beneath a sea of stars. Everything else turned fuzzy.
************
And now Flora was sitting up in bed with an aching head and an aching body. Images of the door in the mountain and the meadow covered by a glass ceiling filled her head. And she remembered another door in a tree, a door to an elevator and white lab coats. Or was that something else?
“Ouch!”
Flora looked up to see Aster sitting up in bed, rubbing her head. Kava had just hit her over the head with a pillow.
“Right, we don’t want to be late for our first day at the Institute,” Flora said. Kava nodded. It seemed that Flora was starting to read Kava’s intentions as well.
“Yeah, I heard her,” Aster said to Flora. “No need for both of you to nag me.” She rolled out of bed. “Day one of our new lives, right?”
Flora sat up. “Right,” she echoed. “We’re apprentices now.”
Thirty minutes later, Chase led them to the plant conservatory where their first day of instruction with Master Devindry would begin. The conservatory was located underneath the main glass ceiling on a small plateau on the inside of the mountains that ringed the Glasshouse. From the conservatory, they had an excellent view of the central meadow where they had celebrated the night before.
Flora’s cheeks flushed with warmth as she sensed a presence settle down next to her. She steadfastly refused to look, but she could tell it was Garland. Perhaps it was the sound of his heavy footsteps or the moistness of the air that surrounded him, but she was certain it was him. She shifted uncomfortably in her scholar’s robe. She wasn’t quite used to wearing such a heavy garment, and it was quite hot underneath the morning sun.
Silence fell over their cohort as Master Devindry entered the conservatory carrying a tray full of small cups. She was dressed in the same formal robes she wore last night, but in the morning light, she looked more relaxed and approachable. “Good morning children,” she said. “I hope none of you drank too much last night and woke up with a headache.” Flora now realized wh
y her head hurt so much. “No worries,” she continued. “I’ve brought some specially brewed tea that should clear those headaches right up.”
Flora thankfully grabbed a cup as did the others. “Oh, I can think again,” Bunsen said almost immediately.
“Cheers to that,” agreed Garland. Flora turned to see him give her a wink and then averted her gaze. She wasn’t sure what he meant, her foggy memory refusing to clear.
“Good, now let’s start then shall we?” Master Devindry said. “My name is Master Devindry, and I am here to teach you about what we do here at the Institute. The Institute exists to protect and progress humanity’s knowledge. We are the seekers and the guardians of civilization. Now children, who can tell me what the basis of human civilization is?”
No one spoke up. Flora felt like she was back in Mrs. Gardners’s class.
“Oh, come now children, that was an easy one,” chided Master Devindry. “The basis of our civilization is agriculture. Without agriculture, we would not have food, and without first fulfilling this basic need, we cannot aspire towards anything else. Growing up in Terrene, you have all had significant experience in farming. You all understand the basics of soil, water, and sun. Having passed the exams to enter the Institute, you understand about the nitrogen cycle and the carbon cycle, correct?”
The students nodded. “Good,” she continued. “Look around at this garden. What makes this garden different from your fields in the valley?”
Flora looked around at the plants. “I don’t recognize any of these plants,” Flora admitted.
“Yes, yes,” Master Devindry said. “But look at the qualities of the plants. What is different?”
Flora looked again. There were so many different varieties, more like a recreational garden rather than the main crop fields in Terrene. And lots of the plants in the conservatory were yellowing or drooping. Most were not fruiting or blooming like they would be back at home.
“It looks like your plants aren’t as fruitful as the ones back home,” Stalk said mockingly.
“Exactly,” Devindry said with a large smile, transforming Stalk’s smirk into a look of confusion. “They aren’t doing so well because they are experiments,” she explained. “The crops you have in Terrene are production plants. They produce fruit all year round. They prosper in the soil and sun you have available. And they do so because here at the Institute, we have designed them to do so.”
“Of course, in Terrene, you can tweak the designs. You use grafting, nutrient control, and other botanical techniques to create interesting, and often very tasty variants.” Flora thought back to Rina’s spicy broccoli. She wondered what she was doing now. “But here, we design plants in a completely different way. Over the next two weeks, I will show you children how we design completely new plants for food and other purposes. It doesn’t happen here in the fields, it happens...”
Despite these startling revelations, Flora found her eyes wandering off. She stared up at the glass ceiling. It sparkled in the sunlight, much like she imagined ice must sparkle. She pictured a ceiling made of pure ice, stretched across the sky from one end of Terrene to the other. When the sun shone on the ice ceiling, it would cause rain to fall and create fabulous rainbows that...
“Come on Flora. We’re going now.” Flora snapped back to see that the rest of her companions were getting up to follow Master Devindry. Mendel gave her shoulder a small shake. “Devindry’s taking us to the laboratories now,” whispered Mendel.
“Underground?” Flora asked.
“That is a likely proposition,” responded Mendel.
************
Master Devindry led them back into the mountainside, through a series of hallways and eventually into a large cavern. Flora guessed that they must be near the same elevation as the central meadow but couldn’t tell what direction it was in. The rock ceiling stretched twenty feet over their heads. Natural sunlight streamed through a multitude of shafts in the ceiling, providing ample lighting. The cavern was likely large enough to fit all the scholars in the Institute, but now there were only about a dozen people scattered throughout the area.
As Devindry walked into the room, the scholars looked up from their work and bowed slightly. Master Devindry gave a quick nod in acknowledgment. Flora had no idea what they were working on. There were many odd pieces of equipment made from a mix of glass, wood, and metal arranged on rows of large tables that made up most of the room. One side of the room had large curtains that hid a section of the cavern from view. Like the rest of the Institute’s system of caves, this cavern teemed with plant life, with hardly any bare rock in view. Vines snaked into the room from the hallway and covered the walls. Some of these plants undoubtedly illuminated the cavern at night. Others seemed to be purely decorative, creating beautiful floral arrangements along the ceilings as well as the walls.
The students gathered around one of the empty large tables where Devindry began her lecture. “Now children, in your basic education, you learned how DNA is the genetic code which determines the traits that organisms exhibit.” Flora winced every time Devindry referred to them as children.
“Every organism, from the plants in your vegetable garden to each of you, has a unique and complex genetic structure,” continued Devindry. “Here in this laboratory, we manipulate that DNA to design new organisms with the traits that we find desirable.
“Now, we don’t have the tools to actually see the DNA molecules. Instead, we work with cultures of cells and apply processes to the entire cultures at once.”
Over the next few hours, Devindry showed them how to grow cell cultures in small glass dishes. She demonstrated how special enzymes were used to cut the DNA strands into pieces and how these separate pieces could then be introduced into other cells. Flora concentrated on paying attention but found the processes and terms to be extremely complex. The enzymes that did the cutting were called nucleases. The cells that carried the DNA pieces, which were also called genes, were called plasmids. Why didn’t they just call them ‘cutters’ and ‘carriers?’
Bunsen, however, looked completely at ease. He was excitedly asking all sorts of questions while Flora was just trying to keep up.
Devindry grabbed a glass dish from one of the scholars working in the room. “This particular culture holds a very important gene,” she commented. “It’s a gene we call Sho, and we include it in almost all the plants we design.”
“What trait does the gene promote?” asked Bunsen eagerly.
“The gene controls the production of cytokinins in an organism,” she replied. “Cytokinins are hormones that delay aging in plants. The inclusion of this gene in Terrene’s food crops has allowed them to survive disease better and allowed their fruit to last longer. Before we introduced this gene, fruit would often go bad in just a couple weeks.” Flora thought back to all the fruit and flower art the people of Terrene created every year. A well kept display would typically last six months. She couldn’t imagine putting all that work into a nice arrangement only to have it rot in a matter of weeks.
“But how do we find the specific genes that have the desirable traits we want?” asked Bunsen.
“That’s an excellent question,” Devindry responded as Bunsen looked on adoringly. “There’s a lot of trial and error. Most of the time we take plants which have the trait that we want and take random sections of their DNA and incorporate them into other plants. Eventually, we find the trait that we want, and then we maintain samples of those genes in our library. Since this process can take decades, this library is one of the Institute’s most valuable assets.”
“Can we see it?” Aster asked.
“Unfortunately, I can’t show you the library,” apologized Devindry. “Only the heads of the department are allowed access.”
Bunsen looked disappointed but was quick to begin asking questions again. “Does that mean you find all the genes you need from existing plants? Don’t you run out of variety in the genes?”
?
??It’s true,” Devindry said. “We also need to discover new traits that none of our current plants have. Now children, how do you think we might do that?”
“You mutate them,” Flora muttered.
“Exactly,” exclaimed Devindry, surprised to hear Flora speak. Flora was surprised herself. Her mouth was developing a habit of acting on its own. “That is the most astute comment I’ve heard in years from a new apprentice,” Devindry continued.
“But mutations are bad,” protested Crick. He looked angrily at Flora. “They damage the genetic code, right?” Crick didn’t sound too sure.
“You can simulate evolution and speed it up,” Flora said, glad for a chance to show up Crick. “If you can create random mutations, speed up the development of traits, and select for desirable traits, you can create new traits.”
“Flora’s absolutely correct,” Devindry stated. Flora smiled. She was getting the hang of being smart. She had to admit that she liked it. The next several hours flew by as Devindry showed them all the details of their genetic engineering processes.
That night, Flora lay in bed, exhausted from the giant brain dump she experienced today, yet unable to sleep.
“You awake?” Aster asked.
“Yep,” she grunted.
“I can’t sleep either,” Aster commented. “I’m tired. That’s for sure. But there’s so much stuff in my brain that I can’t sleep.” Aster lay in silence for a few moments. “Hey, how did you know all that stuff about mutation and stuff? I never learned that at school.”
Flora wasn’t ready to tell other people about her dreams just yet. “I dunno,” she replied noncommittally. “The words just kind of came out.” At least that wasn’t a lie.
“Hmmm,” Aster said.
************