Buy One, Plant One
Admiral Biscuit
I was in the middle of installing a new hard drive in a desktop when my phone rang.
Instead of letting it go to voicemail right away, I glanced over at the display, and for once it wasn’t a scammer telling me that the warranty on my car was about to expire. It was a friend.
I set down my screwdriver and pushed the green phone icon. “Terrence.”
“Hey, it’s Sprout. I know it’s a Saturday, and I hate to bother you on your day off, but I got a bit of a problem over here.”
“What kind of a problem?”
“Uh . . . it’s a printer problem.”
“Printer, got it. I’m in the middle of a build; is it urgent?”
“Not super urgent,” she said. “I don’t wanna pull you away from paying work, but—”
“Gotcha. Let me wrap this up, and I’ll head on over.”
“Thanks!”
I heard a couple clunks and a few random beeps as she tried to disconnect the call and finally succeeded. Sprout had mixed luck when it came to human tech. I’d shown her the advantages of a computer versus the clunky pony typewriter she’d been using, and she actually understood that rather quickly. We had to do some experimenting when it came to input devices, finally settling on a stylus for mousing purposes and a combination of a weird sliding-platter keyboard along with voice-to-text.
Sprout was generally smart enough to not fool around with settings. She kept a printed sheet next to her keyboard to remind her how to get into infrequently-used programs, and had desktop shortcuts for the commonly-used ones.
Overall, of all the friends I provided tech support for, she was the least likely to download a virus or manage to somehow delete something she relied on.
***
After verifying that the computer recognized the new disk drive, I screwed the case back on, packed up my tools, and headed over to Sprout’s house.
She lived on the north side of town, in a sleepy little neighborhood with big trees and large lawns. It was a little too rural for my tastes, but suited her well. She’d complained once about not being able to raise chickens in her yard, but nobody had complained about her landscaping. Flowers in front, garden in back. Even the driveway was landscaped; she’d put down raised boxes full of dirt for more flowers.
It was a pony thing.
I parked on the street and thought about grabbing my toolbag, but couldn’t think of much I could do to actually fix a printer.
Her front door was open and I could see her inside, actually working at her computer. She’d put it in the living room because she liked being able to see out the big bay window into her yard when she worked, and I couldn’t fault her for that.
I knocked on the screen door to be polite, and she turned her head. “Oh, hi, Terrence. Come in.”
“Thanks.” I thumbed the latch and pulled it open, then walked across the living room. “So you said a printer problem? What’s wrong, it won’t print?”
Sprout glanced over at her printer. “Oh, no, this one works fine. That’s not the problem. Hold on a second, I gotta save this.” She picked up the stylus and clicked the screen. “It’s out back.”
“Out . . . back?”
“Right, so last month I was at Office Max getting some more paper and a new printer seed, ‘cause the old one stopped working.”
I nodded and followed her down the hallway. She called the ink cartridges ‘printer seeds,’ and it was too adorable to correct her. She knew the part number and knew how to buy them, so it was a harmless little thing.
“And I usually put them in the little envelopes and send them back like you’re supposed to.”
“You can just return them directly to Office Max,” I said. I was pretty sure they took them.
“They do? Then how come they have mail-in envelopes folded up in the package?”
“For if you get them somewhere else. Like Wal-Mart or wherever.”
“Oh.”
Her back door was also open, and as soon as I got a look at her garden I saw the problem.
“How does this even happen?”
Her ears drooped. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
“It’s not like printers grow on trees,” I muttered.
“No, that’s a vine.”
“Yes, a vine, of course it is.” I felt like I was in a daze as I walked down her back porch steps.
“I was expecting a tree, that’s what the sign said, that’s why I planted it where I did. Even if printer seeds are obviously from tubers, but that’s not what the picture showed.”
I only vaguely registered what she was saying. Her whole backyard had been given over to rows of plants, less neatly arranged than a typical human garden would have been.
Not that it wasn't orderly, because it was. But she didn’t believe in segregating crops like most humans did; she put plants that got along next to each other, so she had beanstalks climbing her cornstalks, sunflowers presiding over tomato cages, pasture grasses around the fruit trees, and so on.
Sticking out like a sore thumb was a thick vine, trailing across a patch of clover. And sprouting from that vine were dozens of printers, small units towards the narrow end of the vine all the way down to a fully-featured commercial laser unit near where the vine poked through the ground.
There was no way this wasn’t an elaborate prank, there was no way it could be anything but. Her friends or my friends had set it up just to mess with me.
Except that the cases were soft and pliable, and the writing on them wasn’t in English. The smaller printers looked just like full-size printers which had been shrunken down, or not matured yet.
Except that they were very clearly attached to the vine, and there was an unmistakable greenness to most of the plastic. If it even was plastic.
“Is this what normally happens?” Sprout asked.
I paused before answering—I felt like I’d just been slapped upside the head with a trout. “This?”
“Yeah.”
“Actual printers growing on an actual vine?”
She nodded.
I gave her the honest answer. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen this before. How did you do this?”
“I planted the printer seed. They’re expensive and I thought I could grow my own, but I must have done it wrong because all I’m getting is printers and there’s only one or two seeds in each one. Is that how they normally grow?” She scratched her chin. “Maybe that’s why the seeds are so expensive, and the printers aren’t. Or maybe it was the wrong kind. Maybe I shouldn’t have used a high-yield printer seed.”
“Printer seeds—I mean, ink cartridges don’t grow, they’re made in a factory.”
“Are you sure?”
I looked back over at the printer vine and its crop of half-ripe printers. I actually wasn’t sure any more. Talking ponies was weird, the way she could magically magnet things to her forehooves was weird; were printer vines any weirder?
Yes.
“I’m sure. There are factories that make all the circuit boards and chips and other factories that put them all together. Printers don’t grow on trees.”
“Vines.”
“Or vines. Or any other kind of plant. Even if you somehow managed to make that happen. This isn’t some kind of elaborate prank, is it? Because if it is, it’s brilliant.”
She shook her head. “I was just trying to grow my own printer seeds, instead of having to buy them all the time. I thought that’s what HP wanted.”
“What they wanted?”
“They had a sign at Office Max saying that they could be planted.”
“No, they didn’t.”
“Did, too. They said to buy one and plant one.”
“There is no way that they had a sign that said that. You must have misread it.”
***
Sprout didn’t have a car of her own, but wasn’t opposed to riding in one. I opened the door for her, and she hopped up and tugged the seatbelt across her chest with her teeth.
It wasn’t really made for her physique, but better than nothing. The first time I’d seen her sitting in a car seat I’d thought it was strange and then it had started to look almost natural, at least from the waist up.
I checked the mirror before pulling out on the street, then when we were underway asked her which Office Max she’d gone to, just in case it wasn’t the one in town.
“Maple Valley Mall,” she said. “That’s the closest, and the omnibus stops right out front.”
That was the mall I’d first met her at, kicking butt playing DDR in the arcade. Four legs were better than two at that game.
***
In hindsight, after seeing an actual printer vine, the fact that there was indeed such a sign at Office Max was unsurprising.
Admittedly, the fine print in no way suggested actually planting a printer or an ink cartridge; it instead said that for each printer purchased, HP would plant a tree.
Just the same, I had earned Sprout’s stuck-out tongue, and bowed my head in defeat.
“I ought to go in there and complain,” she said.
I tried to imagine how that would go, eventually deciding that as entertaining as it would be, it was best to dissuade her. “No, don’t do that. It’s not their fault. They get their ads from someone else. Besides, were you really harmed by your little experiment?”
“Not really.” She leaned back in the seat. “Just some wasted time. What am I going to do with all those printers, though?”