The greenhouse didn’t seem to be all that special to begin with, except for the fact that it was immense, and tiered rather strategically. Each tier produced several layers of plants, some for eating and others for other purposes. I found this amazing, because as I walked around trying to get a good idea of what Nido did here, I caught the odors of some of the best scents I’d ever smelled in my life. It smelled surely floral at points, but like the most pleasant perfume I could remember. Also, there were some of the prettiest flowers on some of the tiers, and the tiers themselves were laid out most strategically, with optimum exposure to the sun and the climate seemed perfect to grow nearly anything I could think of. The greenhouse seemed to be about three stories tall, but one of those stories was actually underground. Looking around I could see all kinds of plants, I saw many kinds of vegetables growing in what looked like an orderly manner, where some sections of them would all be in the same stage of growth at the same time, and ultimately at the end of any line of vegetables would be a cart with what looked to be the best grown and freshest vegetables I’d ever seen. I couldn’t have guessed who would have picked these, except for that I looked over, and saw by each row of any given plant, some sort of robotic arm attached to a small set of tracks. I saw one in action tilling the soil and getting the next batch of seeds ready to grow.
I figured that Nido had these robots finely tuned to take care of his greenhouse so that when anything was needed, they could work automatically to bring in harvests and tend to their sections easily. They actually looked quite a lot simpler than they probably were, with three prods that acted like opposable fingers, and in the center of each of these quasi mechanical hands was a small probe that looked like it could feel when the vegetables were ripe for the picking. As I examine one of the nearest automated hands closer, I noticed that it had very delicate pads on the end of its ‘fingers’, when I tried to touch it, it reacted by opening up and almost displaying itself to me. I was a little curious about this, and figured that someone had programmed it to react to touch as a routine maintenance check. The pads themselves seemed to by very tactilely sensitive, and so were likely used to test the ripeness of the vegetables. As I looked around the greenhouse I would have estimated that there were about thirty of these arms in use, each tending to a plant on either side of its tracks. As I looked out into the room, it seemed like one arm or other was always moving in some way. It was actually fascinating to see each arm tending to its plants, and when one would sense that a plant was ripe it would pick it and place it in the carts to be taken away to where I could only guess.
The whole greenhouse seemed to curve in a sort of boomerang shape, and on the bottom floor in the center was a smaller more exclusive greenhouse. I decided to visit this section along the little walkway that Nido had made for himself sometime earlier. Kelly, exclaimed about how interesting this all was along the way down with me, and we chatted about how futuristic and interesting the robotic arms were. We walked down to the smaller chamber and when we opened the door, we found ourselves in a much smaller and more interesting greenhouse, filled with what looked like experimental plants and designs. Then we noticed on the walls and at a small desk, a chart filled with Nido’s language about what only could have been horticultural research on his part, replete with diagrams of whole flowers by section. It seemed that Nido took special interest in genetic research in botany. I couldn’t make a great deal of it out just yet except one plant looked a lot like a tobacco leaf. I noticed too, that there was a good deal of special tools in this room, and a good deal of microscopes and gardening gear that Nido must have used especially for this more exclusive greenhouse. I went to the tobacco plant I’d noticed earlier and started to smell it. When I inhaled the delightful scent from this plant, I caught that it was not just tobacco, but tobacco crossbred with the scent and presumably taste of vanilla.
It then occurred to me to whiff the pipe I had absentmindedly carried from the last room here, and noticed that the smell was pleasantly similar, in fact it hadn’t crossed my mind until now, but I figured Nido must have grown a good deal of his own plants. I myself had smoked cigars on occasion and a pipe once or twice, so I figured Nido must have some shag around. I started looking for it, when Kelly, who had always loved gardening and was looking at the tools Nido had set up, asked me what I was doing.
“I’m looking for some shag for this pipe. Nido apparently grew tobacco I announced.” I announced to her casually.
“You’re going to smoke a dead man’s pipe?” She asked a little unbelieving.
“Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but smell this tobacco leaf, it’s delightful” I returned like a child who had just been chastised.
“Hmm, it does smell good,” Kelly remarked taking a whiff and then continued by asking, “still, is the pipe clean?”
“Yeah, I can see no evidence of use come to think of it, though Nido seems like he was a bit obsessive about cleaning his things, he was always like that, especially at work.”
“Okay, well, just be careful, I’m sure it’s fine.”
This was a little off putting, but I was eager to try this stuff out, and after looking around for it, couldn’t find any, but then the notion hit me that the actual finished product may not be here. It would more likely be where he actually smokes or even dries and cut the leaves, but I didn’t know where that might be at present, so I almost put it out of my mind for a minute and marveled at some of the other botanical wonders and began to talk to Kelly about some of the gardening equipment that she was much more familiar with than I when the corner of a notebook that was sticking out near the desk caught my eye. I paused right in the middle of the conversation with her, and fetched it. It appeared to be an English explanation for everything that was happening in this room, experimentally speaking. As I flipped through the pages that had many of the same diagrams as the ones I’d seen earlier and found a section about Nido’s experiments in growing tobacco. As I read on, he described a little of how he loved to smoke a pipe and always had throughout his life, but that he was devastated to learn of the carcinogenic effects of smoking, so thus developed the perfectly flavored leaf that was cancer free. He went on to describe the process of trying and testing the tobaccos and spending a fair amount of time researching what he believed were the main causes of cancer and so on in his tobacco and simply tried to breed it out through careful and meticulous research.
I explained all of this to Kelly, and she looked a little stunned, even now at hearing of Nido’s diligence in this way. She asked if she could see the notebook and I showed it to her. She started thumbing through the pages and found many things she thought were of great interest. One of these things she started to describe to me, and I was equally as impressed. Nido had somehow matched his favorite scents to some perennial flowers and made it so that they would alternate between many different scents on any given day in the year. I asked her if she knew what scents he had done and she said she wasn’t sure about most of them, but one of them, looked like it belonged to Joy at some point in time. When Kelly mentioned this, I asked why she thought so, and she mentioned that the name Nido had given the flower was ‘Scents of joy’. She pointed out that ‘joy’ wasn’t capitalized in this title, but looking over it in the description Nido was fairly specific about what he wanted the scents to be. One of them, Kelly said was a fragrance she remembered her mother wearing as a child, and thus this must have at least a little of a perfume odor to it. I then asked Kelly if she saw it growing anywhere, to which she replied that she thought she did, and pointed to a wildly beautiful flower growing in a solitary jar with lots of technological attention around it.
As I looked closer at the flower, I was quite curious to smell it, and see if Nido had indeed created the scent he hoped to. I asked Kelly if it would be okay to open it, and she said yes and carefully took off the cover. Being close to it, I found the odor to be almost pungent because it was so strong but after the initial blast of odor had escaped it actually smelled wonderful, simply wonderful. My nose had never suffered so much pleasantness in one day, especially with the good smells coming from the rest of the greenhouse earlier. Kelly looked like she was in paradise; she had always had a very sensitive nose, much more so than my own, so this must have been a very rewarding find indeed. She smiled at me with a subtle euphoria as if to say this was the scent her mother had worn so many years ago.
“So, do you recognize the scent?” I asked a little earnestly.
“No, not quite, but it is very pleasant, don’t you think?” She answered.
“Yes, definitely… how does it change odors throughout the day?” I returned.
“Well, I’m not quite sure, but I think it has something to do with the cycles of the sun,” Kelly remarked and then continued, “so, for instance in the morning it may smell like… coffee for example, but not this plant, Nido had something else… oh, here it is, lilacs. Anyway, as the day continues it changes scents to something else, like lilacs, and around noon to something else, like steak and ale pie. I think this acts as a good alarm clock of sorts. When you smell something new, you know it’s time to eat, or what not, plus it is far more subconscious, what an interesting idea!”
I certainly had never thought of using fragrance in such a pragmatic way, I always thought it was too subtle to really do much but apparently Nido had found use for it. I thought for a second and then responded to Kelly by asking her “How long do you figure it would have taken Nido to figure this out?”
“That’s hard to say,” she replied, “my guess is that he was very diligent with his research both in the laboratory and in the library, so to speak… meaning that he followed the research of others in the field and did a lot on his own,” she paused for a moment in thought and then went on, “basically, I’m sure he was pretty adamant about his research for many years, and I noticed that the notebook he had out in English had no mistakes in it, but I’d bet you that if we went through any of those other numerous notebooks, most of the ideas in there would be scraped or wouldn’t have worked in the end.”
After that, we decided to leave the inner greenhouse to explore the greater green house a little more, Kelly carefully replaced the protective glass over the ‘Scent of joy’, and we went back out into the greenhouse. Something curious struck me as we walked out into it, and I looked over to Kelly to see if she had brought the notebook with her. She had brought it, and I asked to borrow it, to which she dutifully gave it to me, as I looked through, I asked her what she knew about growing vegetables. She told me not all that much, but asked me why I might ask.
“Well, I’m not all that familiar with it myself, but I do think it’s a little strange how these robotic arms and carts and things collect all of these vegetables and move quite a lot.” I told her.
“So what are you saying?”
“Well, basically, what I’m wondering is: why do they move so much, I mean, doesn’t it take a while for plants to grow, can’t you sit still while they’re doing it? Plus, what does Nido need with all of these vegetables anyway?” I asked as if interrogating Kelly a bit, to which I quickly tempered my tone, “it just has me really curious is all.”
“Well, let me see that notebook again, I’m not really sure how to answer your questions without it.” Kelly replied sweetly.
I returned the notebook to her and after some time of looking through it, she looked at me and said she thought she found the answer. She explained that Nido seemed to have modified the vegetables to grow rather fast, but she also thought that the arms were very careful and attentive in their work, because he wanted all of his vegetables to be as perfect as possible. She supposed that Nido probably consumed most of what he grew, and even though this greenhouse was quite large, (especially considering there was no real hint of it from the outside, mysteriously), it would still be too small to subsist a person for long if that was his intention with it. I decided I’d go and see what Nido was actually growing with the rest of the normal greenhouse, and so it was that Kelly and I walked through trying to figure out what Nido was growing.
Going through the rows, what was perhaps most interesting about everything, was that it actually wasn’t terribly interesting what he was growing, it all looked like normal vegetables, like carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, broccoli, beats, asparagus, soy, green beans, peas, corn and many other vegetables. There was a hydroponics section too. All of these rather uninteresting vegetables, were grown not only rather quickly, but also rather closely, they all looked quite healthy, but there were just so many in such a tight space. Nido really knew how to take advantage of all of the space he was given. Even having said all of this, it surely wouldn’t be enough to feed any one person. I wanted to see where all of these vegetables and so on were going, so thought I’d follow one of the carts, which was small but big enough to hold a bucket load or so, to a small door it went through much like a pet door inside of a larger door. I opened and entered the door, and beckoned Kelly to come with me. When we went through we found ourselves in what appeared to be Nido’s kitchen. It was a little cramped and everything seemed to be covered with glass. There was a large sink and all of the cabinets and cutlery and everything seemed to be exposed, but had a distinct plastic covering over it. I was a little surprised by this, because there was simply nothing left out.
The little cart continued on its track and went to a destination, where like a Rube Goldberg device it dumped its contents (in this case spinach) into a tray that was well marked for spinach. Now, I knew that this must be something that was slightly unsanitary, since Nido had died so long ago, the food must be completely foul. I opened up the spinach tray, and to my surprise there was spinach that was a little older, but not by much and was still extremely fresh. I wondered why if these processes had continued while he had died, they wouldn’t be overflowing, or at least quite rotten. It had escaped my consideration that there was a distinct possibility Nido had taken this into account when designing a system of such automation, but more the question I had was, how? I asked this question aloud, and Kelly looked over to me and asked me ‘how what?’ I told her what I was wondering about and she thought for a moment and replied that was a good question and that she didn’t know either. After some thinking, I decided to take the contents out of this drawer and check it, when I did that, I noticed there were sensors for odors, or at least I presumed that is what they were for, and I found there seemed to be a trap door on the bottom of the drawer. When I tried to open this trapdoor, I found something that made a lot of sense, but hadn’t crossed my consideration before, but it led into a compost heap.
I removed a little of the compost with my fingertips, and showed it to Kelly, when she examined it, she said it was some of the most fertile soil she’d ever seen. She looked at it and showed me how the dark colors mixed with everything gave it a richness unlike she’d ever seen before. Kelly said you could probably grow about anything in this, and that there were special additives Nido must have mixed in to give it this excellent fertility. She then opened and looked through all of the other drawers, which weren’t big, but each one would have the freshest vegetables inside of it. They were all labeled, but again in Nido’s language, so we couldn’t quite understand them, but opening the drawers and checking them was easy enough. All of this food was making me hungry and I asked Kelly if she wanted to eat. She affirmed that she too was hungry and asked if I could make something. I told her I would, and as I went to go get a knife and kitchenware, I found everything seemingly locked up in the glass cases I’d described earlier. Looking around the case, it became evident that there were buttons to press to open them, and having done that, I found myself making some simple snacks for Kelly and me. I took out a few plates and glasses to drink with and we ate our small meals and conversed while doing so.
“This kitchen is remarkable,” Kelly exclaimed.
“Yes, it definitely is interesting; I quite like the ambiance,” I quipped.
“Yes, it gives a deep sense of stimulation, especially with the hues of yellow around it, it just makes me want to think and to think and, oh I don’t know… relax I suppose.” She said, and then after a long silence “Stephen, this food is superb, I’ve never had such good vegetables, how’d you do it.”
“Oh, don’t thank me, thank Nido, he’s the real creator of the feast. I assume he must have taken many painstaking hours to cross breed these carrots. It is nice that he put all of these glass panels up so that I can see what it is I want to cook with. This would be a great idea if we ever put new cabinets in our place.”
“Yeah, that would be a good idea, I don’t know Stephen, with half of the things here, I’m tempted just to stay here forever.” Kelly remarked playfully.
“I wouldn’t blame you, I’d move in too,” I joked back, but half seriously. It hadn’t actually occurred to me, to maybe actually move in here, but it seemed like a grand idea, coming to think of it now. We soon finished our meal and I didn’t know where or how to clean everything, there were no towels, or washcloths or even soap in the kitchen. There was nothing to clean with, yet everything was spotless, I was quite confused, how did Nido keep his whole house cleaner than anything I’d seen, yet have nothing to do it with? I asked Kelly about it, and she was a little confused to, and just as a little experiment, I thought I’d put one of the knives I’d taken out of its case back, when I did nothing happened immediately so I figured it had failed when I saw a light go on in the case with the knives in it, and suddenly a good deal of water and what seemed to be soap washed through it. I put my hand over the top of it, and it was nicely warm, then suddenly it was all cool, and I opened the case, to take the knife out again. When I took the knife out again, it was spotlessly clean. I was surprised; it appeared that Nido had designed a self cleaning system for his kitchen so that he wouldn’t actually have to wash or take care of any of this himself. I then proceeded to put the rest of the dishes we had used back into their original places and as soon as I’d shut the door to those cases, they were all again spotless within seconds.
Kelly seemed equally as taken aback as I was about all of this. She then continued with the joke of moving in jesting “Stephen, if we had a place where we didn’t have to wash the dishes, I’d definitely move in!”
“I know, Kell, I’m excited too! Just think, any time you want to have a party, all you have to do is put everything back where you found it.” I said bemusedly, “of course, if something broke down, I mean, who would you call to repair everything?”
“Well, we couldn’t call Mr. Nido,” Kelly said mirthfully, but soon covered her mouth realizing that she’d said something in bad taste. To this I simply smiled and laughed and let out a happy “True!”
“I don’t know, maybe he has some sort of machine for just that problem.” I said keeping up the jovial spirit we were both in.
“Well, what else does Mr. Nido keep in his kitchen?” Kelly inquired, and started looking around to see what Nido kept around. As she looked, she found some interesting things, and we could discover a little about his eating habits, this way. There were almost no brand names in the kitchen and when there were, it was very fairly exotic foods like spices that I’m guessing Nido just didn’t want to take the time to grow himself. It appeared that Nido grew almost all of his own food. He seemed to be a vegetarian, but did consume dairy products. There were some kinds of cheese that were left over, albeit they were frozen, anything that had a rotten odor to it must have been thrown away before. Nido did eat a lot of bread and pasta, which he appeared to make himself. This was a little strange, because I saw no hints of wheat or rice in the greenhouse earlier. I would have guessed that he bought it from an outside source, but it was hard to tell, since there were almost no store brands for nearly anything here. Nido had some more interesting machines in his kitchen, but many of these he probably didn’t invent himself. There were bread and pasta makers and things like that. I couldn’t tell how much time Nido likely spent here, but one thing was obvious, he ate to live, and not the other way around. I say this, not because the food was bad, it was delicious and always fresh, but I think he made it that way to make it palatable and enjoyable for life, but he was no friend to gluttony either, he only ate what he needed, he just made what he needed to be rather desirable.
Kelly and I sat at a small table on the side of the kitchen, where Nido obviously took most of his meals, and as we sat and took in the atmosphere and digested our food we began to talk again.
“Kell, what do you make of it all so far?” I asked.
“Of what, Stephen?” she asked back.
“Well, of this whole house, I mean we haven’t even seen half of it, I’d wager, and yet, look at it and us, I’ve certainly never been in a place like this in my life.” I clarified.
“Well, I think Mr. Nido was a very inventive man, with a lot of talent,” she answered cheerfully.
“Yes, yes, but beyond that, what do you make of him, I mean you never met the fellow, what do you think of him, not having known about him?” I asked earnestly, as I was genuinely curious to her opinion about this strangest of people.
After thinking for long time, Kelly answered, “What I think really is that Mr. Nido was a sad man in many ways, he obviously always had to work, but preferred to do it at home. I’m still not really sure why that might be, but I do know that his life must have been so lonely. It makes me wonder what a life without other people would do to most people. I personally would go completely crazy and certainly wouldn’t spend my time doing things like this. I feel that Nido needed to be alone, and though I feel quite sad and my heart breaks for him about Joy, I think it was just the excuse he needed to really tend to all of this, which seems to have been his true life’s passion. What do you think?”
This had all taken me a little aback. I wasn’t really sure how to respond so simply said a long drawn out “Well…” and after a minute or so I said, “I think you’re right, Kell, having known him, he seemed like he was always thinking and that he just wanted to get home and carry out a lot of his thoughts when he did. I didn’t realize to what extent that might be. But being here now, it is a lot more evident. The thing is, Kell, Nido had such kindness and longing to be social in his eyes, it was like he was forbidding himself from temptation. When we would talk, him and me, he was such a kind old soul and sounded like he could have charmed absolutely anyone he wanted to. It was like… he restrained himself from really letting out. He wanted to live and I guess to die as well, solitarily. I think now, looking at it, he felt like he had a higher purpose, not a better one, but a different one maybe…” I didn’t really know how to conclude this, so I simply stopped, and looked over at Kelly with a kind of ‘are you ready to go’ look. We headed back toward the door and back through the greenhouse to we found that same hall, we took it downstairs to a very dark and mysterious room I couldn’t tell what was on first glance.
