All participants in this work of fiction are over the age of 21.
***
Dr. Susan Nareese Optenbauher, all one and a half meters of her, stands looking at the sea of huge flowers ahead of her. The blueish green plants around her feet, a typical grass variant found on almost every life supporting planet, end in an almost perfectly straight line. The other side of that line is bare dark brown fertile soil. That very distinct division runs for as far as she could see in both directions. Behind her, tens of thousands of hectares of wide open plains, where the blueish knee high grass is the dominate plant with various other typical and unremarkable plants scattered in the mix.
What stands ahead of her though, is unprecedented. The sea of flowers, seen from orbit is actually as close to a perfect square as possible. A square, almost three and a half kilometers on a side, is one of nine squares that make a grid pattern. Each square is exactly the same distance from each other, just over two kilometers. This grid is one of three on this plain. Plus two more sets of three, one each on the other two smaller continents. There are none, nor any sign of ever being, on the one sub-continent or any of the thousands of islands.
And while that is really fascinating in of itself, the truly remarkable feature is the plants, with their sheer size. The stem is actually quite short in comparison to the size of the flower, only one and a half to three meters tall, with wide flat spade shaped leaves alternating up either side of the half meter thick stem, like a ladder. But the flower heads are humongous. Most of them are a deep blue, however from where Susan stands, she can see a few mixed in that are a deep vibrant purple. Susan also knows, from images taken from orbit, that there are clusters of bright orange. The smallest one she can see standing at the edge of the 'garden' is at least three quarter meter across with petals almost a meter in height. Some of the others are so big she could hold a tea party for six with room to spare. And the pedals must be four meters! They remind her of a cross between a hibiscus and a lotus flower. And they smell wonderful!
Someone went through a lot of work to do this. Problem is, there are no signs of intelligent life on the planet. Or on the other two solid planets in the system. Or on the dozens of moons orbiting any of the the planets of this system. No cities, towns, or even a hamlet. Not a single recognizable habitat, structure or road. Not even the suggestion of worked stone. Or a sign post. Of any kind, anywhere. Just these perfectly square gardens filled with gigantic flowers.
Over the three hours since landing, then setting up, Susan has run every test she could from her position, a meter from the boundary. Scans, soil samples, pollen counts. She even collected two larger than normal samples of the air, compressed and filtered them just to get pollen and scent markers, hoping to be able to replicate the scent as it is quite divine. She happily hums away to herself as she works.
It dawns on her suddenly, there are no insects. No biting pests or flies. Not even the crawling beetle variants that are so common across the dozen or so systems explored by humanity. Puzzled, she walks back over to the shallow hole where the sampler had dug and pokes around. Then she checks all the various sized sample containers. Then the sampler's logs. No bugs. No worms or tunneling life forms of any kind. Strange. She notes this curiosity in her tablet
With the sun reaching it's peak in the sky, Dr. Optenbauher starts packing up all the samples to shuttle back up to the TSF Venture in orbit. She puts in the call to Mike Yvinski, mechanic and security coordinator.
"Hey Mike, almost all packed up. Wanna send Bot over and we'll get this stuff stored?" A few seconds go by. Just as she was going to call again, Mike comes on the line.
"Hey Doc, give me sec. Was just cleaning a fuel valve." She could hear tools being pushed around, then beeps as Mike feeds instructions into a console. "Bot's on his way. Need a hand?"
"No, I think I'm fine. I'm just going to take a few more snaps and set up a sensor just inside the square. Let it run for a few days, see if anything beeps. I'll be in shortly."
