Elias is tending the Garden. He is feeling very at ease with himself and with the Universe. He treasures these moments of serenity, as he remembers many times in his life when it seemed that all the serenity (and safety) in the world had evaporated from the face of the planet.
The Garden is a little rough-hewn, like everything else in the village of Eff-One, first outpost of something vaguely resembling civilization in the rural agrarian non-society of Freak Nation. This Garden is actually not an outdoor garden but a big rambling shanty of a greenhouse, patched together from old quonsett huts, chunks of scrap corrugated tin and fiberglass, yards of plastic sheeting, and other random assorted bits of scavenged obtainium. But the uncertain daylight filtering through the roofs is an uncannily good approximation of light sifting through a healthy forest canopy, and the midspace of the room is densely green like a healthy forest floor. Huge swaths of green cover the tables running the length of the room--tables constructed of more obtainium, mainly sheet scrap lumber held up by a herd of sawhorses. The mass of greenery, the trays of dirt and growing medium from which it all sprouts, and the dirt floors puddled here and there with runoff from the irrigation driplines, all give off the dense reek of the living vegetative world--especially the wing of the Garden dedicated to cannabis.
Elias putters among the tables, ostensibly checking the condition of each crop, but really more just absorbing the vibe and giving it back. Especially when he reaches the wing known as the Head Bed. No tables in that room; here the dirt floor has been tilled into proper condition for an exceedingly odd crop. They look like huge onions, a good four feet or more in diameter, just their topmost bulges breaking the surface of the soil; except those bulbs are covered in human skin, and the tufts growing out of them are not greens but human hair.
This is where Heads come when their bodies can no longer sustain those huge crania of theirs. The exhausted Heads are brought here, and laid out gently on the soil, and instead of dying their bodies take root and grow into the earth. Eventually they submerge head-and-all into the breast of Mother Earth, where they remain, sessile but very much alive, and freer than ever before to roam the telepathic virtual world known as Head Net.
In fact they, and the other Head Beds scattered about Freak Nation, together serve as the Head Net backbone. In each Bed the Heads’ bodies put forth roots into the soil, not only to gather nourishment but to make contact with their neighbors; eventually their intellects become so interwoven that they can function as one huge communal brain. That gives the Bed the psychic bandwidth to traffic-direct all the billions of thoughts per second pouring through Head Net, sustaining and animating the virtual Head Space within. Without the Beds, the Net would not exist.
Elias, not being a Head, has only ever gotten glimpses of Head Space when given a lift by various Heads of his acquaintance. He prefers the physical freedom of his kind, the Furry Freaks, though sometimes the shedding is a royal pain in the ass in the summer. But he does like the general contact high of strolling through all that brain-energy in the Head Bed. And sometimes he does hitch a ride into Head Space; and sometimes the Head Bed hitches a ride on his brain, and rides him to an errand they need done in the physical world.
Now he feels a glow like the first really warm day of summer embracing his wide shaggy shoulders, and he knows the Head Bed has come calling to hitch a ride. <<More than that,>> they murmur in the back of his brain. <<We’re taking you to meet a visitor.>>
Oh, her. She’s arrived, huh? Cool. Very. He feels the Head consciousness slide in next to his own and look out through his eye sockets.
<<Why don’t you drive?>> they say. <<We knew you of all people would be just as into meeting her as we are.>>
Feeling the mantle of Head Net resting gently on his
shoulders, Elias ambles over to the nearest exit and slips out through the
plastic sheeting that serves as its door.
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