[This story was one of seven winners of the inaugural July 2025 Speckled Spectrum Awards. It was first published in Amazing Stories, and is reprinted here.]
Gillian’s fame began as a kid, when she buried that egg.
She’s a great little sister, but you’ll see her craziness. Like when she shredded fresh beets from our garden into the clothes washer, hoping to turn her white shirt into that strange magenta. Which it did, along with mom’s best work blouse. When mom cooled down, we all talked about how to plan and manage experiments. Then mom wore that blouse to her Council meetings, telling everyone G colored it for her.
Another time, Gillian visited Bradley’s house and found his dad’s tablet open to the scheduling app for inbound orbiting cargo. While he made lunch, G used the app to revise the offloading sequence so that shipments for the candy and dry goods shops got priority over hospital supplies and metal for the forges. That caused another series of stern talks.
Stuff like that happened about every week. Once, Ms. Smitherman in the clothing shop pulled me aside to ask, “Allison, why can’t your sister be more like you?”
I smiled, looking around at that perfectly-boring store, and said, “Because someone’s gotta think outside the box. Most of us don’t know how.”
I know this story’ll go off-world, so to tell you about the egg, I need to explain our planet. Alpha Centauri A is a G2 yellow star, like Earth’s sun, but a bit brighter. It has two habitable planets, a and b. We live on planet a, and because it’s stupid to say ‘Alpha Centauri A a,’ we call our planet Kinnaara. That’s close to Indian for ‘centaur’ and it retains those adjacent a’s, which people like.
When we arrived, we found native plants, from shrubs all the way down to algae, but no animals. Our plants love the air and soil here, so a major industry is farming. We don’t raise animals for meat, because we grow that in tanks. But some folks keep a few chickens, for their eggs.
So, Gillian came up to me one morning, beaming, and I said, “What’d you do now.”
She said, “I planted an egg.”
I said, “Say what?”
She said, “No, really, I did.”
She was only seven then, but she knew all about seeds and how they sprout and become plants. And our neighbor told her that when a rooster puts his seed into the egg, then the chicken’s egg becomes fertile. G figured a fertilized chicken egg has a seed in it. So she planted one, to see what it might grow into on this weird planet. She marked the spot with a little ribbon on a stick, and watered the soil daily.
We sisters shared that secret. I wanted to tell her it wouldn’t work, but an inventor learns more from failures than successes, and you never want to squelch the innovative spirit. So I smiled and said good luck.
Who wants to get too excited over one wasted egg, anyway, right?
“Come see! Come see!” Gillian screamed at me, dragging me out of bed. A plant’d sprouted where she buried that egg. Little thing, with gray-green leaves. Not much to look at.
Squinting in the glare, I told her, “G, it’s most likely that some native seed sprouted here. You know it’s not your egg, right?”
She jutted her jaw out at me, saying, “Well, we don’t know that for sure yet, do we?” And she kept watering it, with dad’s chicken manure ‘tea.’
When she made me go back out there again, a couple weeks later, it looked different from other plants, sporting flowing, fuschia feathery foliage.
The next time we went out there together, she stood by it and those fronds, taller now, wrapped around her, warm and welcoming. “See?” she said proudly, “We’re friends.”
Then she said, “And watch this, Allison.” She stroked a frond, and it reached out and stroked her in return.
“OK,” I admitted, “now, that is different.”
Dad went nuts, and called in everybody. The government tried to ‘protect’ G and her plant, meaning kidnap and study, but the courts said that’s not happening. I loved that judge so much that I attended law school.
Nobody’d thought of our worldwide web. An underground network of native fungus. Sort of like on Earth, only this fungus thinks. And, apparently, manipulates. It didn’t much care about our Earth plants, and it didn’t react to our bacteria or chicken manure, but that egg!
Fast forward to today. Mom and Dad own Kinnaara Sentiplants, I’m VP of Administration, and Gillian’s our VP of Product Development of Plant-animal Hybrids. She never made it to high school but is the brightest person on this planet.
We ship everywhere. Some are working plants and some are pets. Of those, my favorite is the Krimmzlop, because you can suck on its sweet fruitibud while you pet the soft, furry trunk, and it floods you with dopamine, if you keep it well-fed/lit.
Dad’s learning how to communicate with another new plant, the Kinnawonder. G grew that one from a piece of her hair wrapped around a native Klexicad seed. It’s teaching us all sorts of new farming tricks.
And, as I write this, the wildest thing is that a potted Kinnslyn just asked Dad to invent a battery-powered cart for it, with a communicator panel, so the Kinnslyn can move itself around and speak English. It even wants a spaceship ride. Kinnslyns say that plants sacrifice constantly for the good of their planet, and for humans. But in return, humans need to change in several ways.
A university’s rising within sight of our farm, and we welcome the scientists. Tourists flock here too. Those pushy crowds, though–ugh. It’s not easy, trying to lead a cultural revolution.
I’ll close this by saying, good job G! We’re sure glad you planted that egg.
(the end)
