Abi vibrated the tablet clutched in my hand waking me up. “Liam, we are arriving.”

I Stretched to both relieve the muscle tightness and to look out the window. “Can you land us near the new power station?” I asked through a yawn.

To my surprise, Abi understood me.

“The power station is next to the delivery landing pad; we will land there,” Abi said.

Out the window, I watched as we passed over 584’s village. Children stopped their soccer game in the square to watch the large drone flyover. A group of adults sat on a patio attached to the community center building, probably eating dinner. The drone landed, this time letting the rotors come to a stop; the transport would be waiting for me for when I was ready to leave.

“Abi, start message to Minnie,” I said and lifted the tablet to level with my smiling face. “Guess who just landed in town?” I spun around to show the village over my shoulder. “Hop on your boogie and meet me over at the power station.”

Tapping the red circle on screen, I ended the recording and swiped it up to send. I stepped back into the transport and came out carrying the bucket and supplies.

584 was one of the early villages and up till a month ago had been powered by solar panels that were no longer producing enough electricity to support the residents. A new fusion power station was built underground in a facility visibly outlined by freshly disturbed soil and a lack of plant life similar to the landing pad. The village was down a gentle slope from the pad and station; a short retaining wall had been built to make the large, flat landing area. The power station instead had a slightly steeper incline of what was now just dirt and rock left from the excavation. The hill didn’t need to accommodate foot traffic, prevent erosion, or serve any other purpose than to transition from the level of the pad to the slope of the hill down to the houses. It was simply ugly.

Setting down everything I had brought next to the hatch, I dumped the purple heart cuttings and took out my trusty trowel. Over the next half-hour, I amended soil, drilled holes into the bucket, and connected hoses.

“Abi, did Minnie respond?”

“No new messages in your inbox,” Abi replied from the earpiece.

“Okay, start a new message to Minnie. Voice only. Hey Minnie, I should have known you were napping. I was too before I arrived. I’ll just tell you what I was up to and spoil the surprise. The ugly dirt mound you told me about yesterday will soon be covered in a beautiful purple plant you might have seen from childhood. The common name is ‘purple heart’. I diverted the condensation off the cooler from being piped down to the village grey-water tank to a solar-powered, harvested rainwater drip irrigation system so you don’t have to worry about watering more plants.”

Pausing for a moment looking down at Minnie’s house at the base of the hill, I considered walking down there to wake her up and maybe have coffee together. If I did, I’d be there for hours as we swapped stories like we have many times.

At that time, Minnie was over 100. She’d lived through the Great Collapse but unlike my parents, she didn’t get to weather the storm in a high-tech facility with healthcare, food, and clean water. Minnie survived it all because she was tough; and because she was lucky enough to avoid disease long enough to make it to the early refugee camps in Angola. The camps weren’t the end of her trouble, but it gave her a secure place to sleep and two meals a day for several months until WISE ramped up its production of food and medicine. When the villages started getting built, Minnie jumped on a truck and found herself living in an all-women’s tent near where 584 is now.

“Hey, well, inbox me when you are up. I gotta get back in the air. Talk to you later, brat.” I ended the recording and swiped it out to her inbox, packed up my tools and the trash, then headed back to the quadcopter that Abi had already begun spinning up. A minute later, I slowly flew over the village back towards home. Sitting back in the chair watching out the window as Tribe 584 crept out of view, the tablet vibrated.

“Minnie is calling with video,” Abi said.

Bringing the tablet up to bring my face into the frame, I said, “Answer—Hey!”.

Minnie appeared on screen, sitting in her overstuffed lounger. “You should have come down and knocked,” she said.

“I didn’t want to disturb you. I just got in the air heading home.”

“Yeah, I had the window open for some fresh air and heard the commotion—did you have one of the big ones?”

“It was the first thing available,” I responded.

“Well, I’m looking out the window now. All I see is some little dark spots on the hill,” Minnie said switching to the rear-facing camera to show out her window.

“Maybe you can get out of the house and go look at them,” I said, “I bet you have been in that chair all afternoon.”

Minnie switched back to the front-facing camera showing at first just her wrinkly forehead and neatly buzzed white hair, then tilted it down to bring her scowl into view. I knew this facial expression. She wasn’t mad at me; she was buying time to think of a comeback.

When I first met Minnie, she was quicker, both mentally and physically. She had approached me after I successfully fended off dozens of tribal elders in the farming ambush; I’d assumed she was another one of the elders and started to give her the spiel but before I could get started, she called me a “brat”.

Caught off guard by the reproach made by a frail, dark-skinned old woman who—even then—had 20 years on the elders I’d previously spoken to.

“You’re being a brat about this,” she said, clearly knowing I needed to hear it again to be sure I’d heard her right. “I know you have plenty of spare time.”

“Excuse me?” I mustered, floundering for a response.

“I took a course taught by your mum last year. I recognized your name. We talked after and she told me bout her son who decided plants and talking robots were all he needed. She also told me your scam,” Minnie said.

I had at least 30 centimeters on her, but I suddenly had felt like I was knee-high to her. I blinked and opened my mouth, “did she tell you I have a cat?”

Minnie paused, nearly imperceptibly—man was she sharp then. “Shame. You’ll introduce us.” She grabbed my arm, not through my elbow like to escort but by getting her thumb tightly fixed onto my fleshy bicep. “You may call me Minnie. Your mum mentioned you had a flower garden. You’re going to show me. And den you’ll help me grow lavendah. And I’m going to meet your cat.”

She nearly stole Stalker from me that afternoon. Well, or rather Stalker considered his options and I may have only won because I let him out to hunt mice on occasion.

Minnie, some years later, had taken a fall that broke her. Her physical injuries were repaired quickly and she mostly recovered from those. The injury that had not healed was to her young soul. She’d told me during a long chat that she was resisting WISE intervention and that she was ready to let nature take its course. “There is music to life,” she’d said. “I want to end on an upbeat.”

I suppose triple digits was a long time to live.

She’d thought of her retort. “From dis chair today, I have brightened the lives of a dozen children. You? Just one old lady.”

“Hey, everyone can enjoy what I did.”

“Izit?”

“You boogie your ass up the hill and go look.”

“I’ll do it just now,” Minnie said.

We disconnected.

“Why did I do that?” I wondered aloud.

“What do you mean, Liam?” Abi asked.

“Plant the purple heart.”

“Minnie is your friend and you enjoy doing nice things for her.”

“No, no. I mean what sequence of events led me to have the tradescantia pallida? It’s a plant that Minnie likely had in her garden growing up in South Africa, one that the only reason I had it in my collection was that Doctor Romero gave me a cutting.”

“You are wondering if a decision was yours or mine.”

“Yes, Abi. I can’t help but wonder about that.”

“You are a good friend to Minnie, and you enjoy doing nice things for her—” Abi said ending with what sounded like the intake of breath that people make when they have something more to say.

Abi had no need for breath and had never simulated the sound before. She had no reason to pause for computation or lookup information. From the human perspective, Abi was instant. More accurately, the algorithm at the core of WISE had returned the response in a fraction of a second and moved onto the next process leaving “A.B.I.” to say it in a way that her human would understand. The pause could only be intentional.

Abi continued matter-of-factly and without inflection. “It was the decision I created for you, Liam.”