Greensmith (Unsung Stories)
by Aliya Whiteley
A thought-provoking tale that lingers in the mind.
I’m going to categorize Greensmith as a “thought experiment” because it has the usual flaw of stories that are outside of human experience. States such as being drugged, out-of-body, ill, or ending up in some sort of cyberspace are extremely hard to write, and even if one writes them well the characterization may suffer. Such was the case here. It is written in a laid-back and British style; the adventure starts out as a middle-aged woman who has been cautious introvert all of her life who decided she needed more human connections. She needs a major change in her life.
But instead of having a reckless affair, she ends up becoming transhuman to assist an alien intelligence who wants to help save not only the earth but other planets that are affected by a plague that is killing all the greenery, and eventually all life. He says it’s not affecting our planet alone, and the hope of a cure will be through the flora gene bank machine that her father left her. It seems The Vice, as her father called this device, was of alien manufacture. Her father had used it to catalog plant species – something that Ms. Greensmith continued doing after he passed away. But it holds the key to saving sentient worlds from this widespread plague. Although she is no longer human, and cannot technically be killed, she’s in danger of disintegrating because her senses are overloaded. How she copes, and how they try to solve things and stop the plague, makes for memorable story.
