Bouncer Post #74

Title: PLANTED (I CAN WATER MYSELF)

Genre: YA science fiction

Word Count: 81,000

Query:

A humanlike girl with an affinity to plants arrives on Earth to defend our garden against invasion. To learn English, she deciphers Dr Seuss and christens herself, Sam I Am. While here, she grows and matures the equivalent of a year each day. Billions of neurotransmitters in her stomach, called Logic Cells, enhance her gut feelings. They guarantee Sam complies with her race’s planned immunization of humans against alien mind control. At eighteen days old, her Logic Cells will use pheromones to seduce a human male into mating with Sam to pollinate her spores before her dispersal sack explodes. 



But at fourteen, human soldiers with Yertle the Turtle shells on their heads discover her landing pod. Sam escapes, helped by Brooke, a teenage girl with leukemia. Sam’s attracted to Brooke’s older brother Dylan, unfortunately at four days (years) younger than him, she might as well have poison ivy. Now on the run, Sam realizes using pheromones to control humans makes her no different than the alien tree eaters she’s fighting. Determined to resist, she hopes to blossom into a flower that Dylan desires before she turns eighteen and her Logic Cells unleash their chemical influence on him. Because, prior to completing her mission and wilting, Sam wants to cure the disease circulating in Brooke’s red sap--even if she has to cut out her own stomach to do it.

I was the founder and president of Strategy First, a worldwide publisher of entertainment software for twenty years. Our franchise titles, Disciples, a fantasy, and Jagged Alliance, an adventure role-playing release, sold over one million copies worldwide respectively and were geared to a young adult audience.

First 250:

Thorns spiked from the tips of my twigs, as I scurried along the branch, prepared to drop onto humans to save my little ones, but I stopped, letting water fall from my eyes instead of me. A human enveloped in white from head to roots, plodded from the dull colored cocoon covering my landing pod. He carried a box. He carried my cloned saplings. Mother said, have patience, watch, learn, and when it hurts, think about something else. The first mutilation I deciphered in the dead forest named library. Its words helped when a female had asked my name.

“Sam I am,” I said.

She laughed. “Where’s your Mother, Sam?”

I pointed upward.

She touched my limb. “Oh, you poor dear.”

I almost forgot. Never reveal Mother orbited Earth.

No, thinking of the genocide called books did not help. I imagined my tiny boxed buds, screaming words from Yertle the Turtle and Gertrude McFuzz. “I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.”

Leaves crackled underneath. More humans, wearing green with what looked like turtle shells on their heads, prodded the bushes with stingers. They had my little siblings, now they wanted me. A final drop of water escaped from my eyes. My mouth opened wide as it splattered on the bare limb of a human beneath me. A fair-skinned male with clusters of small flat brown spots on his cheeks and nose, lifted his head exposing blue frightened eyes.