A small, orange flower on the corner of west 34th street

In 1743, the German naturalist Traugot Gerber unexpectedly left his teaching post at Moscow University and attempted to flee the country. He died suddenly in the city of Vyborg, near the Finnish border. His herbarium of 2,400 different species, which he had collected throughout his life, was never found.

In 1884, in South Africa, the orange gerbera daisy (Asteraceae) was discovered growing naturally on Table Mountain. Its taxonomy was classified as the same as a flower collected by Gerber on the Volga river over one hundred and fifty years earlier. No one has explained why it was growing at that latitude.

The hothouse flowers reached up to the lie of the cold December sun that broke through the conservatory's glass ceiling. Lara shuddered briefly as she moved inside the humid, equatorial room from the brisk New York morning outside. Rows of orchids, Amazonian lilies and begonias filled the roof-top greenhouse, obscuring the view of the nouveau skyscrapers outside.

Lara pulled off her coat, hanging it on the small rack next to the door. Moving through the lush vegetation she emerged into the centre of the room where an old man sat at a table, potting saplings in small terracotta urns.

'Jean-Paul' said Lara smiling.

'Ah, mon cheri, Lara, welcome to my garden enfolding spots of sunny greenery.'

'This is a true pleasure dome Jean-Paul. It even has its own caves of ice.'

The white-haired Frenchman gave a brief smile and turned back to the plants on the table, picking up another seedling and gently tapping it out of its pot, encouraging it to take its first steps in the world. Lara sat down on the opposite wooden bench and took up another seedling, teasing out the roots for transplanting in the waiting pot.

'I see you have not lost your les pouces verts, your thumbs green since going to Langley' said Jean-Paul.

'You didn't ask me here to spread mulch Jean-Paul. What do you want?'

Jean-Paul sat back. 'Non, no I did not.' He pointed to the seedling Lara was potting. It had sprouted a small, orange flower.

'What is the plant you have there now?' he asked.

Lara looked at it more closely. 'I'm not sure' she said. 'It looks like a genus of daisy.'

'Qui, tres bien. It is a member of the Asteraceae family. An interesting fact about the Asteraceae family - they all have either fifty-five or eighty-nine petals based on the Fibonacci system which...'

'I know Fibonacci numbers Jean-Paul, I watched The Da Vinci Code.'

A slightly pained look crossed Jean-Paul's face. 'Well then, count the petals on that flower.'

Lara paused and studied the small flower in her hand. A mayfly meandered over the table.

'Sixty-one' she declared. 'That can't be right.'

'Non, it cannot be right. Yet there we are the having. I have been cultivating that plant for over a year now, and each cutting will produce flowers with different numbers of petals. Any odd number from fifty-seven to eighty-five. But never fifty-five. And never eighty-nine.'

'From the same cutting? But that is just...'

'Impossible! D'accord! But it is fact.'

'There must be some explanation. A mutation?'

'Non!' said Jean-Paul. 'There is not, it cannot happen in nature this, this, obscenity.' His face had become flushed. 'This is something else.'

'What do mean 'something else.'

'I have studied the taxonomy of this plant, its history. And let me tell you Lara, it has a very strange history. I even went to the length to give it to my friends at MIT to complete a cellular analysis. And what came back...'

'What was it Jean-Paul?'

'It is not a plant, mon cheri. It is a machine. And it is everywhere now you know' he said. 'Wedding bouquets, street corners, potpourri. Just another flower that is kind of nice to look at, nothing more.'

Lara looked down at the delicate flower cradled in her hand and dropped it as if stung. 'What do you mean it is a machine?'

'Just so. An object mechanicale, a device with a creator, unknown and unknowable that can do two things.'

Lara's voice sank to a whisper. 'What two things?'

'It can reproduce' replied Jean-Paul. 'And it can absorb and store information from the environment.'

He picked up the flower that Lara had dropped, crushing it between his fingers.

'It is watching us.'