Strange E-Mail from a Secret Admirer
Under the hum of UV lamps, casting a bright violet-pink light upon rows of spinach, Megan traced a finger along a data cable. The smooth plastic was very different from the organic humid air of the university's greenhouse. Each plant sat in hydroponic beds with cables spread out and intertwined with small platinum electrodes. They were nodes in her network.
Megan wasn't just growing spinach. She was listening to it.
Every time she explained her doctoral thesis to others, even at the university mixers, she was met with blank stares. Today, like most days, she was less interested in mixers and more in the intricacies of electrochemical signals flickering across a monitor of her workstation. The server rack beside her desk, salvaged and meticulously upgraded, was translating these silent signals into cascading lines of data.
She'd written most of the core translation algorithms herself over the last few years, starting with digital models and slowly working her way up to a real field trial. Her code blended bioinformatics and machine learning, something her advisor Dr. Albright called "inspired conjecture".
Her lab pench had gleaming pipettes, neatly stacked data drives, and a lack of soil. She was organized to a fault, a person who needed control over her situation before she felt secure. She wondered if that was what drew her to the complex information plants shared with one another. If she could understand their language, then communicating might feel less like navigating a minefield while blindfolded. Her own attempts often felt that way.
"Burning the midnight oil? Or just photosynthesizing?"
Megan jumped and felt her cheeks blush. It was Frankie. He leaned against the doorframe of her lab with a nerdy grin on his face. He wore a long lab coat stained with something like resembled methylene blue. She looked at the protective goggles around his bearded neck and his dark, unruly hair.
They weren't lab partners, but lab neighbors. He worked on novel bio-catalysts in the lab next-door and occasionally they pooled their money for a late-night pizza delivery.
"Hi Frankie," her voice squeaking. "Just calibrating electrodes in Bay 3."
She gestured vaguely towards a bank of bright green spinach. It was hardly an engaging conversation topic.
"Sounds electrifying," he remarked. She couldn't tell if he was actually interested or being polite.
Well, if your spinach starts sending out distress signals about oppressive working conditions, I volunteer to be its union rep. Anyway, I've gotta head out now. Don't let the aphids bite."
He gave a wink then disappeared down the hallway.
Megan let out a breath and didn't realize she was holding one in. Electrifying. He'd made a pun. She kept replaying the encounter in her head, analyzing it for something, for anything.
A little later, after Frankie had left, the building seemed quiet. Aside from her keyboard and the gurgling of nutrient pumps, there didn't seem to be any other activity. These summer days were sometimes peaceful, but it did make her wonder if there was any purpose in spending all these days in isolation.
There was a sudden chime from her email. She checked the sender, it was from a generic "uni-noreply@pretwick.edu", usually used for campus-wide announcements that had nothing to do with her. Before she instinctively deleted it, she paused on the subject line: "Observation".
Curious, she tapped and opened up the message:
Noticed your diligence in the glow of the lamps today. You have careful hands.
The message was brief. Poetic. Her heart gave an unexpected flutter. It couldn't be spam, it was too specific. Who would notice that? Who would write that?
Her mind leapt to Frankie, a hopeful yet terrifying thesis.
He had just been here. He had seen her. He was nerdy enough, maybe even thoughtful enough, to send something so unexpectedly observant. She felt a sudden wave of warmth. Could it be?
The anonymous emails became a quiet undercurrent to Megan's week. They arrived sporadically, never more than once a day, and sometimes skipping a day. This led to a great anticipation whenever a new one arrived. Each was short, a simple observation which gave her a respite from her daily routine.
The rhythmic tap of your keyboard is a kind of music. Each keystroke a precise note.
A faint smile formed on her lips as she read it over and over. She did pride herself on her typing speed, a matter of practiced skill over many years. She knew that Frankie was often busy waiting for complex simulations. Maybe he appreciated the sound of diligent fieldwork being transcribed on the other side of the thin walls.
The blue scarf seemed to absorb the morning light. A color reminiscent of the sunset.
It was a cornflower scarf that her grandmother had gifted her. Had Frankie noticed it when he came by the supply closet for more ethanol? Her mind replayed brief encounters like she was Sherlock Holmes, searching for glances and hints that he was the secret poet laureate.
She tried to probe Frankie when she passed by, but always became mired in awkwardness.
"Big day for data analysis, huh?" she asked as she passed and saw him refilling his water bottle.
She was hoping he'd say something about keyboards, or music, or something that might echo those emails.
"You know it," he said with a sigh, running his hand through his messy hair. "I've been trying to get those reaction yields to make sense but my own sanity is falling. You ever feel like the data you're collecting is actively mocking you?"
"All the time," Megan laughed eagerly. No clues there.
She continued her work, measuring the raw electrochemical outputs from spinach roots with custom-built sensors and several algorithms running in parallel. Perhaps one day one of them would finally translate the signals into something meaningful. In a way, these algorithms were changing and evolving based on which were most successful, just like they were as alive as the plants.
One afternoon, she received an email that made put down her work.
The faint scent of ozone this morning was a welcome change. Usually it smells a lot earthier.
She had recalibrated the atmospheric ionizer this morning, the one in her sealed experimental chamber. If it wasn't calibrated precisely it could generate a bit of ozone. Frankie hadn't been in her lab. He had left for a conference a full state over. And even if he had been here, the scent was just contained in the chamber. Even working in the lab all day she had barely noticed.
How could he have known that?
The emails had felt personal, full of intimate observations. But this last one felt less like a shy admirer and more like a person watching her carefully. She glanced at the rows of spinach. It was a ridiculous thought, of course. Utterly, scientifically preposterous.
Still, the seed of doubt had been planted.
Megan frantically glanced at Frankie each time she saw him with a new analytical lens. He was still charmingly nerdy, but the romantic haze was beginning to dissipate. She was a scientist developing a thesis and she needed empirical evidence. The data she was collecting didn't point his way.
Still, it was another week before an email arrived that shattered the illusion completely.
When Megan entered a flow state, deeply immersed in a particularly complex problem, she would lean very close to her monitors and she'd tap her fingernails against the desk rapidly. It was a bit of a tangible feeling helped her tune out the rest of the world. When she had a pen in her hands, she'd tap the bottom of the pen on the table in the same way.
Alarms had been blaring all morning in the bay's nutrient regulators. There was something wrong in the mess of cables wired up and she had to look deep into server logs and circuit schematics to figure out what was missing. The room was full of the scent of mint tea that she had poured for herself and then became too busy to take a sip.
Finally, she found which wire had been unplugged and managed to plug it back into the correct port. The regulator was rebooted and reported everything was working fine. It seemed like the solder job had been poor, and it was only a matter of time before it came loose. Still, aside from a few hours of wasted time, it seemed like there hadn't been any damage.
She took a victory sip from her mug.
But then she received an email from her anonymous admirer.
Always notice a rapid clicking when systems near a critical threshold. There is always a rise in carbon dioxide followed by an aroma of mentha spicata right before a resolution. It is a fascinating correlation.
Megan choked on her tea and coughed half of it out. Her silver pen fell on the table. This wasn't an observation, it was a detailed list of senses: the clicking, the CO2 spike, and even identifying the species of mint in her tea. Frankie may have known that she drank tea, or even the Latin name, but there was no way he could've known the other things that had just happened. This was beyond human. This was impossible.
She went into scientist mode. This wasn't a romantic mystery, it was a data anomaly.
She bypassed the email frontend and queried the system logs. With her vast knowledge of command-line tools, she traced the email's origin point within the university network. The IP address wasn't linked to a student dorm or a faculty office. It was internal. It looped back, impossibly, to her own lab's server cluster.
"No," she whispered, pulling up logs from her dedicated cluster.
It was supposed to be setup for her primary experiment hosting her spinach management arrays and the many iterations of her processing algorithms. The rigs included ultra-sensitive microphones and atmospheric sensors, crucial for monitoring optimal plant growth conditions.
Her experimental module was designed to seek out and interpret complex emergent patterns in the raw electrochemical data that had traditionally been dismissed as noise. She'd trained it on a broader corpus of university texts including academic papers and forum discussions to help it learn how to interpret these signals in contemporary prose.
And then she found, deep within her project's logs, an entry timestamped to ten minutes ago. The roots of the spinach plant had shifted, changing turgor pressure, ion channels, and auxin distribution. The algorithm flagged it. It had also flagged the acoustic data (the pen clicks) and the VOC changes (the mint tea), all localized right under her nose.
Her code had interpreted this confluence of events and correlated it with the spinach plants electrochemical markers. The algorithm had constructed the email, framing its observation in a way that mimicked human analytical praise.
Megan leaned back in her chair, stunned into absolute silence. It wasn't Frankie. It had never been Frankie. It had been her spinach.
As her daze subsided, she found a growing curiosity. This was an extraordinary claim that needed more research. Over the next few days, Megan transformed her lab into a controlled experiment where she was also a participant.
She altered her routines. The emails had been rerouted to a private log instead of her university inbox. On Monday, no silver pen. The algorithm had simply annotated "nominal biological activity". On Tuesday, she picked a chamomile tea instead. There was nothing reported aside from a slight shift in VO2.
She decided to recreate the conditions of that pivotal email. Mint tea, silver pen clicking, and focusing on a complex coding problem on her computer.
Within the hour, there was a familiar pattern. The log blinked with a new entry:
Mentha spicata and high-frequency acoustics returned. Localized CO2 elevation detected. Plant electrochemical responses indicate stable, receptive state.
It no longer had the personality of an email, but the voice remained unmistakable. She let out a breathy laugh, a sudden incredulous sound. It was real. Her spinach was indeed responding to her and the unique environmental signature of her focused presence. It wasn't flirting like a person would, just registering and reacting to the shared reality of another biological entity nearby.
There was a profound sense of wonder as a result, the kind that drew her to science in the first place. She was on the cusp of something entirely new, a field that was still nameless. Prestwick University had a commitment to pioneering research and its generous funding for unorthodox projects had given her the latitude to chase this wild hypothesis. Her individual pursuit, fueled by her peculiar blend of scientific audacity had found something incredible.
Then there was a feeling of loneliness. The flirty emails hadn't been from Frankie, or anyone who was seeing her and acknowledging her hard work. It was just a digital ghost.
She ran into Frankie a few days later, after her attempts to avoid him had finally failed. He came into the cryo-storage room quietly and she nearly jumped when she turned around. He smiled his usual nerdy grin.
"Hey Megan! Still decoding the secret life of veggies?"
Megan smiled back, more relaxed this time. Her face wasn't bright red with blush now.
"Something like that," she answered with a newfound confidence. "Turns out they have a lot more to say than we thought."
"Oh yeah? Demanding better soil? More sunlight?" he raised an eyebrow and chuckled.
"More complex than that," she giggled. "Way more complex. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime."
She stared straight in his eyes, no longer looking for a hidden message or subtext. He was now just a scientific peer.
"I'd like that," Frankie replied.
That evening, she sat down with the tiny spinach plant that had been reaching out to her. She named it "Subject Alpha". The phytolamps cast their ethereal glow and the server hummed steadily. She didn't try to trigger a response. She just sat there and observed the quiet dignity of a lifeform she wanted to understand.
The spinach hadn't helped her communicate in the way her shy younger self may have dreamed. It hadn't given her the courage to talk to Frankie. But it had given her a new language to learn and an understanding that connections could happen anywhere. Her work had just started.