Sci-Fi

by Scribe Leaf Library · 1 min read · 0 views

Of the four hundred people aboard Kepler Station, only Priit had a job that hadn't changed in ten thousand years: he grew things. Tomatoes, mostly, and a stubborn strain of wheat that had adapted, generation by generation, to a sun it had never actually seen. The engineers thought his job quaint. The nutritionists thought it inefficient — the printers could make anything, in any shape, at a fraction of the resource cost. But Priit noticed something the reports didn't measure: people lingered in his greenhouse. They didn't linger anywhere else on the station. When the printers failed during the radiation storm of Year Nine, it was Priit's wheat that fed four hundred people for six weeks while repairs were made, and it was Priit's tomatoes, absurdly, that made the difference between rationing and starving. Afterward, no one called his job quaint again. He kept growing things anyway, the way he always had — not for the emergency that might come, but because a room full of green, growing things had always been worth walking to.