How Stupid Can I Get

By Jeremy Lin

“Their empty eyes turn and watch as you pass. Do you think they resent us for being able to leave?”

“They’re golems, Spinach.” My mother shook her head at my inane question and continued loading the skyship.

“They don’t feel emotion like that.”

I shrugged, the motion sending leaves cascading down my arms. Bamboo leaves, not spinach, despite my

mother’s nickname for me. She used to jokingly threaten to eat me like sauteed spinach if I didn’t hurry up and finish my food. Now she just uses it when I say something stupid.

The fields abruptly ended as we sailed over the guard golems, dense humanoid constructions of kudzu forming a

bulwark against the black grass. I made a mental note to modify a set of ornithopters to carry buckets of water and fertilizer and scatter them as we flew. I wasn’t like the Cultivators, who studied at special institutes to learn how to combat the virus. I was just a teenager that couldn’t make any real difference, but I still wanted to try. Last week in science we were shown a map of all of the land we had managed to recover in the decades after the outbreak, scattered in tiny pockets across Asia and Africa. 4%. That was it. If my constructions could add just another 0.1… no, 0.001%, then maybe, just maybe, I could prove that my interests weren’t useless. That maybe I could accomplish something by studying with the Cultivators instead of with the Builders. I could probably get some good mulch from the consortium on Block 9…

“Let’s get started.” My mother interrupted my musings as we reached my latest outpost. “I want you to finish your

shelter today. It’ll take at least a week for the Cultivators to process an expansion request, and I want you sitting at home doing nothing for as little time as possible.”

I sighed into my hazmat mask as I descended the ladder to the only building in my outpost. It was a simple

single-floor bamboo shelter set in a clearing in the forest, nothing compared to the skyscrapers of the First Sanctuary. It was even less compared to the artful designs of the Third Sanctuary that my sister built, and I knew I could never build structures as sturdy as my brother’s. Still, I was proud of my work and hummed as I accelerated the growth of the bamboo on my arms and cut the final few pieces for the roof. A little snip at the northwest corner, an adjustment to the right on the leftmost door beam, and I was about as close to perfection as possible. I stepped back and admired my work for a brief moment before calling my mother down from the skyship.

“It’s not good enough.” My mother wrinkled her nose as she was forced to duck through the low doorway. “Why is

the entrance so low? Your floorboards are uneven widths. Did you even try to keep this wall straight? Look at this lean!”

“Ma, show me one person other than Frank that can grow perfectly even bamboo. Also, that wall leans like one or

two degrees at most, I don’t know why you’re complaining so much?”

“Your brother grows even bamboo because he has discipline and focus, not because he’s better than you. Do you

remember the dollhouses you were building before your classmates could even lay a foundation? Look at yourself,” she exclaimed, angrily gesturing at my arms. “Your father and I did not choose to splice you with bamboo so you could waste your time tinkering with your silly contraptions instead of focusing on what really matters. Our family has worked as Builders for generations, producing the finest work across all Nine Sanctuaries. You were given the gift and talent to do the same.”

Her expression softened a bit. “You’ve seen the forests, Spinach. You know it’s too dangerous to be working in

them as a Cultivator. All it takes is one mistake, and your DNA starts getting eaten from the inside out. One step outside of a golem’s protection range, one trip where you brought three golems when you really needed four, and you’ll be a dead mass of poison. We’re fragile plant-humans, not invincible. I know you want to help cure the land. I know you want to make a difference. You can still do that as a Builder, you know. I’m just doing this for your protection.”

I sighed as she finished, shook my head, and walked out. We’d had this argument hundreds of times. I wasn’t sure

if I was lucky or cursed to be as stubborn as my mother.

The fields of black grass surrounding the outpost gave way to diseased forests about a kilometer out, noxious

spore clouds choking the air. I hesitated, debating the worth of fighting my way through something that looked worse than my grandmother’s purpleroot stew just to avoid my mother. My hazmat mask would probably protect my lungs, but my mother was right that the bamboo growths in my arms would be infected pretty much the moment I stepped into the forest, let alone the hour and a half it would take me to walk through it. I let out a frustrated sigh as I pulled out my sketchbook. It wasn’t like the atmosphere in that skyship would be any less toxic, and I had to get home somehow.

The ornithopters in my bag were simple carriers, designed to hold materials in bulk and not much else. All I had in

terms of tools was a hammer, a pocket knife, and a bag of fertilizer, nothing fancy enough to carve the intricate joints I needed to make something complex. The designs in my sketchbook were pretty useless too. Floating lights. Hoverskates. An ornithopter that slaps people with fish…? I shoved my sketchbook back into my bag and sat back on my heels, almost ready to go back to the outpost and face my mother instead.

The virus was barely short of a bioweapon, attacking and warping the functions of plant life in seconds. Turns out

that when you figure out how to splice human and plant DNA, people start experimenting with splicing all sorts of nucleic acids. We made electric bacteria that could power cities, mules that could lift six times their body weight like ants, and flying pigs. We “accidentally” made a deadly virus that murdered plants and collapsed communities with ruthless efficiency, destroying entire countries’ worth of arable land in a matter of weeks. I don’t know if we were foolish humans that didn’t know when to stop, or if there was simply no other choice, but we made more. We made photosynthesizing humans because there was no more food to grow and eat. We made Cultivators to cure the land because we believed we had the solution to everything, and we made Builders to expand the Sanctuaries in the tiny pockets of land that had miraculously survived. We made golems to protect those Sanctuaries from the echoes of our ancestor’s mistakes.

Wait. The guard golems. They were built from kudzu because of how invasively fast it could grow, new shoots

filling in the holes as fast as the infected vines were discarded. And the virus targeted them all the more because of it, making them the perfect distraction from our cities. That was it! I just had to make something similarly distracting, an irresistible plant lure for the virus. I couldn’t feasibly grow my bamboo quite as fast as kudzu, but I only needed my golem to survive for an hour, not indefinitely. I pulled out a carrier ornithopter and frantically set about modifying it, shedding bamboo, carving joints, and splicing parts as fast as I could. Three propeller fans. A larger combustion engine. More streamlined wings to fit through the trees. Finally, I packed as much grass as I could into the engine and steeled myself for the worst part. I snapped off two of my own bamboo shoots, hissing as the tender stems broke and tugged on the roots embedded in my flesh. I carefully planted the shoots and fertilized them, watching as they grew and grew until my ornithopter was a hulking amalgamation of living bamboo and plant machine parts. It was horrifying. It was beautiful. And I had made it with my own two hands. Take that, Ma.

It was time to get going. Any later and I wouldn’t make it back home before sunset. I lit the engine and gave my

creation a gentle push into the forest, watching as it glided between trees. The air around it cleared, losing its sick haze as the tips of the bamboo began to blacken. It was working! I dashed through the trees, chasing after the ornithopter and watching in amazement as it flew. I had created that. Just me, with my own ingenuity, a little bit of ego, and enough spite to power a block for a year. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Ma’s face when I showed up. She’d probably yell at me for an hour for using my own shoots to build it. She’d yell at me for another hour for risking going through the forest. But it would be worth it.

It was getting dark when I cleared the forest, stumbling directly into the glare of a searchlight and onto the

ground, dropping my golem. I wheezed out a chuckle that turned into a full-bodied, rolling-on-the-ground laugh. Because my mad dash had been so worth it. I bet nobody else in the world could have been stupid enough, could have been inventive enough, to create a personal protection golem and risk their life testing it. And above all, I had proved my mother wrong. I picked up my golem and stood up as she approached, gently folding its wings. I’d carried it for the last kilometer after its engine ran out of fuel, and its bamboo was an infected mess, and one propeller had snapped off after it scraped a branch, but it was still relatively intact.

“Thanks for keeping me alive, buddy. I think I’ll call you… Odysseus.”

I looked up and resigned myself to my fate as my mother reached me.

“Adair. Zhu. How. Stupid. Can. You. Get.”

Huh. I’d never seen her this furious before. I was honestly surprised that the bamboo framing her face didn’t catch

on fire, given how she was glaring at me.

“What in the world is THAT? What in the world were YOU thinking?! What—” She stopped her tirade suddenly,

turning pale as she noticed the diseased bamboo embedded in the golem. “You’ve made a golem.”

Not a question. I answered anyway. “Yeah.”

“You transplanted… your own bamboo?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t think she said anything after that. The last thing I heard before passing out was a sigh of deep resignation,

the kind you let out when someone you love has done something so extraordinarily stupid and risky that you have no choice but to be glad they’re alive.

I woke up the next morning, head pounding, forehead burning, and congested in places I didn’t know existed.

Expected, to be fair, but still not welcome. My mother came in with a glass of water at one point and opened the sunshade, bathing the room in warm sunlight. She didn’t say a word as I fed my plants, just shook her head and left with my empty glass while muttering something about impulsivity and tempting fate. I thought she’d come back when I felt something settle at the foot of my bed, all hard angles and sharp planes. Hard angles and sharp planes?

I bolted upright and stared straight into Odysseus’ face. Someone had cut away the diseased bamboo and

cleaned up its engine, scrubbing all traces of the forest from its surface. Not me, clearly, and everyone else in my family avoided my creations like they were viral. I didn’t have time to inspect the handiwork, though, because the door opened and Odysseus fluttered off the bed to see who was on the other side. I stared uncomprehendingly as a stranger scooped him up and placed him back on my lap, trying to fathom how he had moved on his own. Golems didn’t do automated, self-governed motion. They were meant to plod along as a Cultivator did their work, to shield them from the phytocide virus and not much else.

“I suppose golems were never designed to fly, either.” I said, voicing my thoughts aloud. “No, but yours does.”

The stranger smiled, their eyes never leaving my face. Odysseus nodded in agreement.

“And I wasn’t designed to survive a six-kilometer run through a forest that’s actively trying to kill me, but here I

am.”

“Hm. But you did anyway, and you managed to survive. Why?” Odysseus straightened and gave a little flutter at

the stranger’s words, almost as if he was… prideful?

“I don’t know… to prove that I could, I guess. To prove to my mother… that the forest isn’t too dangerous for me,

and that I can be a Cultivator if I want to… Wait, why am I explaining this to you? Who are you again?”

“My name is Ankur. Who do you think I am?” They were still smiling. I shifted my focus away from their face, trying

to find the telltale greens of their signature plant. Ah. Red clover.

“You’re a Cultivator.”

“Yes. I fixed your golem for you. He seemed quite pitiful after your little run through the forest, and I thought it

would be a shame to leave him to rot.” They stood up, leaves drifting out of their jacket onto the floor as they spoke. “Never in my thirty-eight years of this work have I seen something like this golem you’ve created. And I do hope I’ll be seeing more of it, and you, at our institute when you get better. Your mother is right, you know. You do have a gift, and I can only imagine what you’ll accomplish given proper training.”

With that, they strode out of the room. Either Cultivators were damn cryptic, or I just had the mother of all fever

dreams. Maybe both, but there was clover on my bedroom floor and an invitation letter to the Cultivator Institute on my bedside table when I woke up.

I regarded Odysseus as I sat up, sending him flapping towards the ceiling in protest. I marveled again at his free

movement, at the sheer breadth of expression he had seemed to gain while I was asleep. I was fairly sure that the Cultivators hadn’t managed to, or hadn’t wanted to, invent autonomous golems yet, and Ankur’s words all but confirmed that. Odysseus should have been no different from the run-of-the-mill golems out on the borders of the Sanctuary. But he clearly was, evidently, given how he was currently fixating on the contents of one of my desk drawers. Unless Odysseus wasn’t just a golem, at least not in the traditional sense. I had given him my own bamboo, as integral a part of me as my heart or lungs. I subconsciously traced over the places where I had torn out my shoots as I thought.

As a species, we had fully integrated with our signature plants, our DNA and bodies inextricably spliced together

with plant growths. To kill someone’s growths was as good as killing them, and vice versa. It was thought that our ability to accelerate the growth of our host plants was concrete proof that we had reached a point in our evolution where our plants were offshoots of our consciousnesses. If that really were true, then Odysseus had inherited a piece of me when I transplanted my own bamboo. It would explain the way he had been flitting around my room, and the inquisitiveness, and the almost human displays of emotion. More importantly, it had staggering implications for how life was created and how we could make better, more effective golems… No wonder the Cultivators wanted to study Odysseus so badly. I smiled to myself, grabbed the letter off my bedside table, and ran out of my room to see my mother.

“Uh oh. You’ve got your planning face. Do I even want to know what kind of insane idea you have this time?” My

mother handed me a bag of fertilizer as I rushed in, refusing to interrupt her workflow. I practically threw it into the nearest corner before handing her the letter.

“You’ll let me go, right? You can’t possibly expect me to stay here and build crappy shelters for the rest of my life

when the Cultivators have requested me like this, right?” I was practically jumping up and down with glee, having finally found the irrefutable proof of my worth I had been looking for in the forest.

My mother smiled, slightly sad, resigned to my fate. She knew that the world couldn’t stop me, and neither could

she.

“I’ve already arranged for you to travel there with Ankur. Just… don’t do anything too stupid, Spinach. Don’t make

me attend your funeral before my own.”

“I won’t. How stupid can I get?” I grinned before delivering the final blow. “I’m your son, after all.”

My mother rolled her eyes. I could tell she was already starting to regret her decision.

Eighteen years later, my plan was finally complete. I had spent four years at the Institute studying to become a

Cultivator. Two of those years were spent just learning how golems, proper golems, even worked. Turns out that the key to creating an exponentially replicating self-sustaining life source is in modifying the energy pathways to funnel photosynthetic byproducts… I digress. I spent another two years learning about the virus, with my classes ranging from its history to understanding its attack mechanisms and how to combat it. I spent fourteen years after that traveling, and experimenting, and building, trying to find the perfect combination of plants.

I had several failed attempts, and some serendipitous attempts that were definitely related to my work. Let it be

known that I still have the scars from a misbegotten venus flytrap and poison ivy hybrid. Let it also be known that my golems are really, really good at slapping people with fish. Odysseus had a particular penchant for winding up with a mackerel. I wonder where he gets it from.

The results of all of that work lay before me, four pristine rows of six seedlings each arranged in a simple box. Each

seedling was unique from its brethren, carefully selected hybrids created from shoots gathered from the most interesting people I met during my travels. I picked up the box and shouldered my bag, whistling to Odysseus as I left the lab. It was time to go.

The line of golems stood at the edge of the Sanctuary as it always did, facing the fields of black grass and the

toxic forest beyond it. Where they used to stand eight years ago was now considered barely outside the heart of the city, though. We’d come a long way. I stopped as I reached the golems, setting down my bag and handing Odysseus the seedlings. The golem directly in front of me shuddered, shedding layers of diseased kudzu as new growths sprung out to take their place. Its eyes stared into mine, devoid of emotion. Perhaps it was for the better that it couldn’t feel what it was going through.

I took a seedling from the box and cradled it, quickly praying that this would work before reaching into the depths

of the golem’s chest and placing the seedling there, wrapping its roots around the golem’s core. I took a step back as the golem stopped shaking, raising its hands to gaze at them in bewilderment as new shoots erupted among the kudzu, green mint runners intertwining with red dahlias and vermillion marigolds spreading across its body as fast as the virus had moments before. The golem lowered its hands, face creasing in sorrow as it stepped out of the line and took in its fellows still fighting the virus. I breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that everything had come together perfectly. The thousands of hours spent creating new fertilizer blends, researching the most effective plant combinations to resist the virus, finding the perfect shoots to create the seedlings, had all been worth it for this moment. I had created a golem that was not only impervious to the virus, but that was also a fully sentient being in its own right, that didn’t have to stand locked in a line forever.

I took the newly freed golem’s hand and led it to the next in line, repeating the same process. Bamboo,

hydrangea, and holly for the second golem. Papyrus, oak, and kelp for the third. And so on, until all twenty-four seedlings had been used. Twenty-four new lives, transforming the field into a kaleidoscope of colors, vibrant greens and blues and reds and purples repelling the black grass.

I set the now-empty box down, scooping Odysseus out of the air one last time.

“How stupid of me, to invent an entire new species by accident, and to completely dismantle our society’s current

protection structure, eh? I did promise Ma I would change the world one day…” “How stupid of us, forcing countless golems to withstand the virus that we created. I spent years resenting Ma for trying to force me to become a Builder, but this whole time we were forcing these golems to be nothing more than fodder.”

I paused, looking around at the transformed landscape and setting Odysseus back in the air. “You can do

whatever you want now. Don’t wait around for little ol’ me.”

Odysseus nodded once and flew off to greet his twenty-four new siblings, leaving me alone in the field of flowers

and my follies. Or maybe they were my greatest achievements.

Their eyes were no longer empty, and mine were filling up fast.