Growing Poppies on a Cloud
An epicenter of high-altitude farming, Cloud Mine Valley is an exceptionally fertile region enriched by the minerals found in its chalky earth — rare composites of calcite, carbonates, iridium and nimbusite. Expanding in a five-kilometer radius, the Poppy Belt forms an archipelago of sweeping fields around the great mining zone (otherwise known as The Pit). Here, the white opium poppy grows, a Papaver Somniferum species twice removed and once extinct that has demonstrated phenomenal resilience at these elevated heights, becoming a fortuitous vein in Cloudland’s industrial fabric.
Within this unique biome, the cloud poppy alone grows as a wild flora, untouched by technology or human intervention. Some biologists call it a botanical marvel (Cutter A. 2022. Poppies on the Cloud) underscoring the fact that this particular genus of flowering plants was not included in the Cloudland Biosphere Origin Protocol (CBOP) during its formative years, and in the interest of protecting the delicate equilibrium of the cloudsphere should have been removed. This, however, has not occurred due to CBOP regulation establishing that
Any species that spontaneously emerges within the biome must be safeguarded in accordance with its status as a native Cloud genus.
The underlying rationale for this is that while an alien spore could potentially disrupt the dynamic equilibrium and performance of the biome, the deliberate extinction of an indigenous species could have equally harmful consequences.
Forestry and farming are still in its infancy on the Cloud. Growing trees and flowering plants on the surface of a petrified cloud through soil implantation and synthetic bioengineering, has required monumental investment efforts. Nube Forest is the largest biotech sky reserve in the earth’s atmosphere, covering thirty thousand acres in a jagged westward corridor. All that breathes, grows and defecates was born out of strings of biocode, nestled within a larger corpus tethered to a sophisticated ecosystemic ledger. The threat of contamination is ever-present but largely contained by electromagnetic incineration shields that prevent low-altitude life from breaching the cloudsphere. Well, with the exception of what has already been dead a while…
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