“I heard the news,” said 1506 to 1507. “1702, right? The old man who lived in that apartment passed away yesterday.”
“That’s right,” confirmed 1507. “People said he was going a bit senile towards the end – he wasn’t that old though, if I remember correctly. Maybe 74 or 75 years old.”
“So what did people mean when they say he went senile?” asked 1506.
“Oh, just rumours about how he started saying crazy things, especially about the plants,” said 1507. “Towards the end he set fire to all the plants in his house and ended up nearly bringing the whole building down.”
“I remember that!” said 1506. “That was him? Now I understand the rumours. But what about the plants made him so crazy?”
“I don’t know, but it has something to do with some kind of revelation he claims to have had,” said 1507. “Some nonsense about how plants domesticated us.”
“What a thought!” chuckled 1506. “But how did he explain that?”
“Well, he said that from a broader ‘survival of the species’ perspective, the plants had much more to be gained by the agricultural revolution than humans – basically they got us to work all day so that they could grow without having to worry anymore about pests, grazing animals, etc.” said 1507.
“But didn’t we grow the plants so that we could eat them?” 1506 countered.
“Yes, but he believed that from the ‘species survival’ lens it worked out better for the plants, because as the human population grew, so did the land they used for farming, and so the plants they grew eventually were able to spread all around the world, thriving from domesticating us,” 1507 responded.
“They domesticated us,” 1507 continued, “but because we believed we domesticated them, humans were never threatened. So the plants kept growing everywhere, giving fruits and oxygen to humans who happily revelled in the results of their labour – never realising that all this was just so that they would ‘ripen’ themselves, so that the plants could eat them when they died.”
“Basically the old man went on about how we are actually food for the plants, rather than the other way around. We are being cultivated to provide nutrients to the soil in the form of our ashes when we die, and more plants grow from the soil fertilised by the perfect food – humans. They are farming us, making sure more and more of us are born into this world, because that just means more food for them eventually – but anyway, that’s clearly rubbish. The man went crazy towards the end.”
“Yes, quite ridiculous…” said 1506, watching his carefully manicured bed of periwinkle flowers swaying gently in the afternoon breeze.