It's strange how much a few weeds can change an entire planet for the better. -- Anon Guest
Creating a cultivated planet is a work of thousands, and centuries. Every part of its graduation into habitability carefully selected, encouraged, and maintained. Experts are kept in cryostasis, woken at the first hint that something might have gone amiss. All to create a manicured paradise. What the client, sleeping away the centuries in smug security, thinks they want.
An engineered paradise. All the pleasantries, and nothing unpleasant. The most sterile, beautiful thing that bioengineeers could create.
Creating fruit trees without annoying insect pollinators had to be the biggest pain. On one hand, hummingbirds were pleasant enough until the client realised they were territorial. Butterflies also scattered unpleasant grubs all over the place. Some, hearing the advice of the biogengineers, opted for small gliding lizards.
But even pretty lizards crapped everywhere and needed other things to eat. Working out an ecology that wasn't the slightest bit annoying or untelegenic was a horrible uphill battle. Everything growing needed something to help it grow. Everything that ate, needed to poop. All those feces had to go somewhere.
Which was why terraforming a cultivated paradise was so arduous.
It got even more annoying when the client woke for inspection and found out how badly things were working out for their plans. They had the finances to throw around for such things. They had all the time in the universe. In both senses of the phrase.
Biogengineer Lors was watching yet another picturesque world teeter on the brink of total systemic collapse. Once again, the world was dealing with the poop problem. The client didn't like any of the offered plants that would flourish with those fertilisers. They needed one plant that would get anywhere, grow anywhere, and use everything that came to them.
She had to break the rules.
Lors went planetside in her sterilised livesuit, pouch of special seeds in hand. "This is for the greater good," she whispered, and set the fluffy seeds loose in the wind. In less than a week, there would be dandelions everywhere.
The client might be annoyed, but the planet would live.
[Photo by Saad Chaudhry on Unsplash]
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