My story “Principles of Advanced Cover Crop Design” (Science Fiction, 1,000 words), dropped today on pro flash website The Arcanist. This article contains notes on this seedy story of hairy vetch and aliens.

The Arcanist publishes one story per week on their website, and you may also sign up to receive the stories in your inbox every week. For years they were a fine semipro publication, but recently they made the jump to a pro pay rate of 10 cents per word. I’ve been reading them for years so was very happy to have made a sale to this market.

WARNING: There are spoilers in this article, so before continuing past this point please take the five or so minutes required to read this short story: Click Here to read “Principles of Advanced Cover Crop Design” on The Arcanist’s website.

Story Origins

This story originated when I read a news article about how cover crops are used on farms. As explained in the story, cover crops are used by farmers to improve the soil, slow erosion, and provide nitrogen. But, they do require significant work as they must be plowed into the soil or killed with herbicides before the real crop is planted.

I immediately jumped to the thought, “what if aliens are using cover crops to terraform the Earth and we don’t even know it?” And then of course I took that one step further: the human race is the cover “crop”.

Driving that day, I heard the song “I’ll stop the world and melt with you” by the group Modern English, and that gave me the ending.

Theme

The theme here is something like: turnabout is fair play. The main character thinks nothing of creating plants that self-destruct given an environmental cue, it’s all just good business. Similarly, why should an advanced alien race care about the human race? Why not use us humans for their own purposes.

Plot Notes

The main character, Jani, is taking care of her ailing husband, Sabastian (Sabby), who suffered a mental breakdown recently for inexplicable reasons. He is now obsessed with aliens-among-us TV shows and goes off on moody rants about Jani’s work. Her work is designing genetically altered cover crops that will self-destruct when exposed to biological agents called microRNA’s. (The science here is plausible: microRNAs can trigger changes to genetic expression triggered from the external environment.)

Sabby is quite upset about Jani’s work, but for no reason that he can explain. This is made clear right in the opening line of the story.

After the caretaker arrives to look after Sabby, Jani makes the most import pitch of her life to a venture capitalist. She demonstrates her exploding crown vetch plants, overcomes all of his objections, and has made the sale. He will invest as much as they need to bring the technology to market. But at the end of the presentation, she’s called home by the caretaker.

Sabby becomes slightly more coherent and explains to Jani that her invention of using microRNAs to trigger a self-destruct sequence in an organism was invented about a million years earlier by advanced aliens. They abducted him to find out how much Jani knew (apparently they are monitoring what’s going on among the humans). Sabby had located very similar sequences of MRNAs in the human genome, planted long ago, so they grabbed him and scrambled his mind. Sabby had found out that the aliens had planted their code in human ancestors and just sat back and watched us tame the planet, locate minerals, build roads and buildings, all without them having to lift a finger. (Perhaps the aliens are about human-sized and so all the stuff we build is usable by them.) As the story ends, Sabby and Jani–and presumably the entire human race–are triggered to self-destruct by a fast moving UFO (presumably releasing some agent into the air to trigger the human self-destruct sequence).

Timeline

Here’s the full publication timeline for this story.

• Draft started June 2019
• Workshop comments integrated by end of June
• Submitted to Nature: Futures June 17, declined August 8
• Submitted to Flash Fiction Online August 19, declined August 28
• Submitted to Daily Science Fiction September 15, declined October 11
• Submitted to ZNB “Apocalyptic” Antho December 13, Declined February 2, 2020
• Due to Covid shutdowns and other concerns I stopped submitting for the rest of 2020.
• Submitted to Terraform January 19, 2021. Terraform silently declined on April 19. (Terraform does not send out rejections, they tell you to just assume its declined if you don’t hear within 4 months).
• Submitted to The Arcanist June 15, 2021.
• Accepted July 28. Minor edits were requested.
• Published September 3.

Total calendar time: 27 months from draft to publication.

Total actual writing time was around 2 to 3 hours including all edits and revisions.

Conclusion

This story had a long road from writing to publication, and was rejected five times and interupted by a pandemic before being purchased by a great online market that had recently turned pro. Writing and selling short fiction requires patience and diligence, the road sometimes is twisty and long, but keep at it and things usually pay off in the end.

See also: “Gator and the Big Buzz” Accepted by FFO
See also: Turning Everyday Life into Science Fiction Story Ideas