I wrote these tomatoes myself
Pawel Halicki
She is halfway through her first drink at the best place for a solo dinner guest: the kitchen counter, where her host is finishing dinner.
— Where's the little terror?
— Getting to sleep. Should be a few more minutes.
— I’ll drink to that. Wait, these are from your own batch?
— Yup. I wrote these tomatoes myself. The peppers as well. Help yourself.
— Wow. I’m happy to be a lab rat tonight.
— Okay. That's genuinely good. Slightly smoky?
— That's the umami tweak. Took me ages to stop making it taste like rubber. But wait for the kick.
— It’s spicy! How can a tomato be spicy?
— Tomatoes and chillies are cousins. The genes are already there. They're just not wired to run the same way in the fruit.
— So you’re just turning it on?
— I wish. Making it spicy without stressing the plant is the hard part. Those DIY models I use can suggest edits but still can't taste a tomato.
He nods towards the balcony. What used to be a narrow strip of plants is now a miniature greenhouse. Identical white trays fill the space, from barely sprouted seedlings to vines climbing thin supports. Every pot has a label.
— You say that like you've killed a lot of tomatoes. How many are out there?
— Sixty-three plants. Eleven recipes. I send my designs to a regeneration lab. They check them, regenerate the plants and send me seedlings. They mail me the seedlings, and I do the growing.
— That's a service now? Will they grow anything?
— Anything that clears home-grow. Everything else needs a proper research licence, but nobody regenerates those custom plants at home.
— This row is twenty-nine F, the smoky one. Those are the next version, which means less heat, more acid. And these are the sandwich ones. Same flavour, less drip.
— And these?
— Oh, those are a gamble. Someone published a fermented-tasting line last year. Seventy-something people have grown it now.
— Successfully?
— About half.
— So, you can just download somebody else's tomato?
— Not the tomato. The edit.
— That's somehow weirder.
— It's just gardening with version control.
— When did you start twenty-nine F?
— About nine months ago. I can tweak a gene expression profile, I mean a recipe in a few minutes, but then biology takes over. That's the annoying part.
— I would go insane.
— I did at first. One change, grow it out, taste it, then decide what to try next. Very sensible.
— That doesn't sound like you.
— Exactly. And one bad bet could cost me six months.
The labels lead them down the row.
— So now I stagger them. Some are still in the lab, some are seedlings, some are flowering, some are almost ready to taste. Every couple of weeks I start a few more.
— Even before you know whether the previous ones worked?
— Specifically before.
— So half of these could already be bad.
— More than half.
— And you're fine with that?
— They're tomatoes.
— Portfolio thinking?
— Exactly. If I had one tomato, I'd be terrified of growing it wrong.
Some plants are climbing out of their supports. Others barely seem worth watering. One pot contains nothing but soil and a label: 41B.
— What happened to forty-one B?
— Great aroma. Absolutely disgusting texture.
Beside the empty pot, 41D is doing considerably better.
— And forty-one D?
— Started before I'd even tasted B.
— You realise you've turned the balcony into an R&D department.
— Better survival rate.
The balcony door closes behind them. At the counter, the peppers are still waiting for the knife.
— So who decides which recipes are worth growing?
— Nobody. The labs decide what they're willing to build. That's mostly safety. Whether it's a good idea is our problem.
— So nobody coordinates this?
— Not until something works. But every recipe carries its grow history. You can see what actually worked, what failed and how many people reproduced it.
— And then?
— If something keeps working, commercial growers start paying attention.
— To some random balcony tomatoes?
— Why not? Enough independent growers, and they'll put it through proper trials. If one of my lines gets picked up, I get a cut.
— Ah. That's how you sold the greenhouse to your wife. How much have you made so far?
— That's not really the point.
He slides the peppers into a bowl. A muffled sound comes from the hallway. The kitchen goes quiet.
— False alarm. What's next?
— Maybe I'll join the crowd trying to stop coriander from bolting the moment it gets hot.
— Finally, a contribution to humanity.
— Thank you.
— This one really is good.
He finally tastes one himself. A note goes straight into his phone.
— Too smoky.
— You're impossible.
— No, listen. The heat is finally right, though.
— Of course it is.
The bedroom door opens just far enough to let his wife out, then clicks softly shut again.
— Sorry to keep you waiting. Harder than usual tonight.
She comes around the counter for a hug.
— Have I missed the tomato lecture?
— We're eating twenty-nine F.
His wife takes one from the board.
— Oh. This one's good.
— Thank you.
— Still too smoky.
— Exactly.
— Is this finally the one that's paying for the greenhouse?
— Potentially.
While his wife starts helping with dinner, she treats herself to another variety.
— So why do you do this, really? You could just buy decent tomatoes and call it a day.
Behind him, sixty-three plants crowd the other side of the glass.
— There’s no other hobby where you can eat something you wrote.
Memories to build from this future:
Go back to an evening you lost to something nobody asked you to do. A puzzle, a song you were learning, something you were making at the kitchen table. At some point you looked up and it was dark outside, your drink had gone cold, and you were nowhere near finished but didn’t mind.
Now, stay with that pleasure of making:
Try to recall a regular evening eating strawberries you had written to look or taste the way you always wished they would.
What did you write into a plant that no shop was ever going to sell you?
How did it feel to watch something you had designed grow at a pace you could not speed up?
Which other things around you stopped feeling fixed once you had written a plant of your own?
Think back to a regular week when anyone on your team could easily create almost anything, so the team's real work had boiled down to finding out what actually held up.
How did the team decide what deserved a proper test when there were more working versions than time to test them?
What did the team start valuing in each other once creating something was no longer the hard part?
Which debates ended once anyone could create what they were arguing about and test it?
Go back to a regular quarter when nobody in your organisation needed permission to try something as anyone could create it themselves. The organisation only coordinated what had already proven to work.
What replaced the plans and approvals once trying no longer needed anyone's say-so?
How did the organisation decide what was worth scaling when everyone was creating the things it analysed?
Which things still required organisational backing, once anyone could create most of them on their own?
Before we finish here.
If most of what you're allowed to try could fail without much cost, what would you start creating more of? Which small thing would you be curious to run a few versions of simultaneously?
And is there anything from this one that connects to other sessions?