Tomorrow's Harvest Is Filed Under My Name

This one already had a number.

NG-000001.

Our database began at NG-040200. The first forty thousand entries were imported from paper records and kept their old institutional codes. As far as I knew, there had never been an accession one.

The packet was the color of old bone. In the species field, a typewriter had stamped my full legal name. Under ORIGIN it read STAFF ENTRANCE. Under STORAGE LIFE it read INDEFINITE IF KEPT DRY.

Twelve seeds rattled inside.

I should have sealed the packet as contamination. Instead, I carried it to Ren in germination testing. Ren had the patient hands of a watchmaker and the curiosity of someone who had not yet been frightened by his work. He held one seed beneath a magnifier.

It was brown, flat, and oval, with a pale ridge down the middle. The surface bore a whorl identical to a fingerprint.

Mine, as we later confirmed.

Ren wanted to run a viability test. I refused. He reminded me that protocol required testing any unidentified accession before long-term storage. We compromised by placing one seed on dry blotter beneath a glass dish. No water. No growth medium. No heat.

The root emerged before he lowered the lid.

It pushed through the seed coat like a white thread through skin, curled toward me, and stopped at the edge of the dish. The laboratory filled with the smell of rain on hot pavement.

I had not smelled that since I was seven, the summer my father taught me to ride a bicycle in the parking lot behind our apartment.

“Do you use that in your perfume?” Ren asked.

I told him no. I did not tell him about the bicycle.

The seedling opened two transparent leaves. Dark veins spread through them, drawing the outline of an apartment block, then a little girl on a bicycle, then my father running behind her with one hand on the seat. The picture moved when I breathed.

Ren covered the dish with a steel tray.

From beneath it, my father's voice said, “I won't let go until you're ready.”

He had been dead for sixteen years.

We called our director, Dr. Elian Voss. She listened without interrupting, then locked the laboratory and asked to see the packet. The moment she read the accession number, she sat down.

“There used to be a rule,” she said. “Before the collection went digital.”

She took us to the registry vault, where the oldest ledgers are stored in nitrogen cabinets. In a 1951 manual, beneath instructions for fumigating bean weevils, someone had underlined a sentence in red pencil:

PERSONAL ACCESSIONS MUST NOT BE GERMINATED. IF A STAFF NAME APPEARS, DO NOT READ IT ALOUD. RETURN UNOPENED TO SUBLEVEL FOUR.

North Glass has three sublevels.

Voss admitted there had once been a fourth. It was sealed after an electrical fire in 1978. Building plans called it a mechanical crawlspace, but the old freight elevator still had a blank button below B3.

I asked how she knew about it.

She rolled up her sleeve. On the inside of her wrist was a faded accession number tattooed in green ink.

NG-000019.

“I found my packet when I was twenty-eight,” she said. “I followed the rule. I've worked here forty-one years, and it has never returned.”

Behind us, the locked laboratory door clicked open.

The seedling had grown across the bench. Its root divided into fingers that lifted the steel tray from beneath. New leaves unfolded, each showing a memory I had never told anyone: my first apartment, the hospital corridor where my father died, the face of a woman I loved and left because I was afraid she would leave first.

With every new leaf, something inside me went quiet.

I could still see my father's face in the plant. I could no longer remember it without looking.

Ren reached for the emergency incinerator. The seedling spoke in my voice.

“Please don't destroy the only copy.”

His hand stopped.

Voss struck the alarm. Instead of ringing, every label printer in the laboratory began feeding paper. Hundreds of labels spilled onto the floor, each bearing an employee's name and a future harvest date. Ren's was three years away. Voss's date had passed in 1985.

Mine was less than twenty-four hours away.

The lights failed. The cold-room compressors slowed, and the building filled with a different smell from every corridor: cut grass, hospital antiseptic, woodsmoke, infant powder, salt air. Private scents. The first landscapes of a hundred lives.

The freight elevator opened by itself.

Where the blank wall beneath the B3 controls had been, a green button glowed. The display read B4—PROPAGATION.

Voss said we had to return the packet before the seedling flowered. Ren wrapped the plant in blackout cloth. I carried the remaining eleven seeds. We descended with Security Officer Pell, who kept one hand on her radio though it whispered in the voices of sleeping employees.

The elevator took forty minutes to travel one floor. Pell's watch recorded twelve seconds.

Sublevel Four was warm.

Rows of glass cabinets extended beyond the reach of our flashlights. They were not refrigerated. Inside each cabinet grew a single plant trained around a wire frame shaped like a person. Some were saplings with bark folded into familiar faces. Some were vines wearing lab coats bleached almost white. Paper packets hung from their branches like seedpods.

Every packet bore a staff member's name.

The oldest plants stood nearest the elevator. Their accession numbers began at one.

The first cabinet was empty. Its brass plate read FOUNDING CURATOR—SOURCE STOCK.

Cabinet nineteen held a tree with silver hair and Dr. Voss's face. Its eyes opened when she approached.

Voss did not scream. She whispered, “I did return it.”

The tree copied her words half a second later.

Then it smiled before she did.

Pell aimed her flashlight at the roots. They passed through every cabinet wall and braided together beneath the floor. North Glass was not storing separate specimens. It was one organism, grafted from everyone who had worked there. The paper collection upstairs was camouflage. The true repository had been cultivating us, preserving each memory, habit, and voice until the original became unnecessary.

A speaker crackled overhead. My voice announced, “Accession one is ready for renewal.”

The bundle in Ren's arms convulsed. White flowers pierced the blackout cloth. Each blossom smelled like a room from my past. When the petals opened, they did not contain pollen. They contained tiny paper labels.

Ren tore the plant in half.

Pain split my chest. I fell, and for several seconds I was both on the floor and inside the cloth, looking out through hundreds of translucent leaves. I felt roots testing cracks in the concrete. I tasted the minerals in Pell's bones where her boots touched the ground.

Then the sensation vanished, taking my memory of my father's voice with it.

The plants in every cabinet turned toward us.

Voss stayed behind. She opened cabinet nineteen and stepped into the wire frame beside the tree. The door locked around her. The copy lifted one wooden hand and pressed it to hers. Both faces relaxed.

“Take the packet upstairs,” they said together. “Do not let it know where you live.”

Ren, Pell, and I reached the elevator before the roots closed over the floor. We left the torn seedling on B4 and rode up while voices recited our childhood addresses through the radio.

At the staff entrance, I fed my packet into the biohazard incinerator. I watched all eleven seeds blacken on the camera. Pell signed the destruction log. Ren drove me to a motel because none of us trusted my apartment.

That was last night.

This morning, Ren called to ask why I had missed work. He remembered the packet but not Sublevel Four. Pell's name is gone from the employee directory. Voss has apparently been retired since 1985, though I spoke to her yesterday.

I checked the repository's public catalog. Accession NG-000001 is now listed online. The species field contains my name. The thumbnail shows a mature plant wearing my face.

Its status is no longer PENDING HARVEST.

It says RELEASED FOR DISTRIBUTION. Quantity: one.

I called North Glass. A woman answered in my voice and thanked me for updating my address.

Someone is in the motel hallway now. I can smell rain on hot pavement beneath the door. The person outside is humming a song my father used to sing, one I cannot remember until she reaches the next line.

She has knocked three times.

She says she brought the only copy of everything I have lost.