Phina's Waking Hours

May I present the best apple:

See, apples, to get a consistent look and taste, have to be cloned or grafted. You can't rely on the seeds because those have been cross polinated by whatever apples are in the area. And since American apples are a bunch of hybrids that combined Eurasian species with the ones already here, you absolutely never know when you're going to get a seed for something good. The vast majority of wild apples in the US were prolific, but they're not very good for eating so colonizers grew them mostly to make alcohol.

This is part of why red delicious apples are nasty these days. Cloning trees based on the color and size of apples instead of taste led to the mealy garbage they are now.

Now, you CAN grow them from seeds. You can even MOSTLY guide which trees get polinated together. But it'll be at least 5 years after planting before you know if the apple was worth the effort of growing. There is zero way to know for sure which blend of genes an apple tree will get any more than we can accurately predict humans. And two trees from the parent trees can be just as different as human siblings.

Because of all of that, it's a billion times more profitable to just clone a known producer of popular fruit.

But there's will ALWAYS be humans who aren't in it for the money so much as love of the game. They have orchards of profitable stuff, but that's just to find their apple experiments. And you can get some DEEPLY unhinged flavors.

One of the farmers from my home town bred apples that tasted like grape flavoring. Not grapes, grape flavoring. He also grew one that tasted like cotton candy and one that smelled strongly of roses.

There is nothing quite as insanely creative and motivated as an autistic person with a special interest in genetics of some kind.

Oh, there are also still many species of wild apples here! You can wander through almost any preserved area in the range where they used to be prolific and find some. Some of the most delicious apple types were found by accident that way.

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2026:

Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.

Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.

Pointing at things and explaining what they are and how the ship works, lots of awed and appreciative noises are made.

Until one of the visiting Eridians points out a specific item. “And that?”

It’s a strange, circular thing, a xenonite disk mounted upright on some sort of pivot so it can spin freely, but around the edges it has… spokes? Pegs? Sticking out of it, that hit against a stiff flap that would slow down the spinning.

It is also separated into sections decorated with crude etchings of a human and an Eridian.

“Ah,” Graces says.

“That,” Rocky says.

“That’s. Um.” Grace seems somewhat embarrassed. “That’s the sacrifice wheel.”

Eva Stratt: