The invention of the Billet Poppy is a testament to the power of an ambitious middle manager. Working as a sales manager out of Salt Lake City for the Rocky Mountain Division of Mayesh Wholesale Flower Group, one of the largest retail flower distributors in North America, Logan Black was faced with a stable market and comfortable, undemanding superiors. In this role he faced no threat to his livelihood nor opportunity for advancement. In the spring of 2024 he set himself to the discovery of problems, in hope that solving them would result in his professional advancement. In comparison to like-positioned peers in like divisions of like markets, Logan employed the most data analysts.

In the reports of Marc Reyes, Logan Black smelled his hope. Cross referencing sales data with flower profiles, Marc Reyes discovered a non-obvious sales marker: softer flowers sold better. Armed with this new intelligence and a stable market field, Logan Black presented his pitch to his superiors. By employing r&d, already genetically engineering new flowers, to engineer and copyright the softest possible flower, Mayesh Wholesale Flower Group could wedge out its competition just enough to tip the scales and begin a more certain march toward monopoly.

The sale was made.

The orders passed down.

Dr. Agnes Mendelwas given the project. She devised the most effective way of creating this flower not to be to modify the genetic code for softness, but rather manipulate the flower’s evolutionary pressure in order to force the evolution of a softer flower.

With this in mind, Dr Agnes Mendel selected the California Poppy for its genetic malleability and rapid generations, growing from seed to bloom in only 60 days. She sequenced its genome and modified its pollen structure in three ways.

First, she made it bind to the oils on human skin.

Second, she made its tactile quality such that when it would bind to human oils people did not find it obtrusive enough to clean off. This proved more time consuming. It  needed not only to be unnoticeable, but also perfectly harmless, otherwise people would wash their hands after touching it. She cross-referenced the new pollen against the already sequenced human genome to ensure it elicited no allergic or health reaction to any known variations in human skin composition.

Third, she made it unable to otherwise pollinate. She modified the pollen such that it was no longer airworthy. It could no longer spread in any but the strongest winds. Winds that strong would kill the poppy anyway. In addition, it bound only to human skin oils. No longer could fur or insect carry the pollen

Essentially, she invented a flower in which human touch was the only pollinator.

After successfully inventing this variation of the California Poppy, she planted a host of them in a greenhouse complex in Iowa and regularly brought tours of people through to see if the flowers that were most enticing would be touched more and the flowers that were most tactilely pleasing would be touched the longest.

Within 10 generations massive visual variation had occurred within the population. Coloring, patterning, and structuring of an almost hypnotic quality began to develop. In her notes Dr Mendel was unsurprised – humans are exceptionally visual creatures.

By the 20th generation olfactory enticements had died out in favor of those visual enticements. The poppy was beautiful and odorless. However, softness, the purpose of the experiment, had not yet begun to develop.

In the 30th generation, things shifted dramatically. All flowers were visually otherworldly, nothing like the California Poppy it came from. In reviewing footage of tours at the greenhouse in this generation no variation in touch frequency occurred. All of the blooms were enticing to human touch. At this point evolution began to select for length of physical contact, leading to softer flowers.

By the 40th generation the poppies were bedding soft.

By the 50th generation the poppies were twice the size allowing for not only more comfortable prolonged contact, but contact over a greater surface area of human skin.

By the 60th people could, and would, play inside a bloom, often wrapping its enormous blossom around a limb for comfort.

By the 80th generation people could sit in a poppy. The petals, soft sheets to lay in. The stigmas, soft pillows to curl up on. Tours of people passing through this Iowa greenhouse would roll, sit, and even nap in these massive poppies.

In this same generation an unexpected mutation appeared. Some of the flowers began to consume nutrients from the humans sleeping in them rather than the soil. The Billet Poppy does not eat people, but rather excess dirt and excretions from the skin. The poppies would clean people as they slept in their petals. This proved advantageous for two reasons.

First, people enjoyed the clean feeling after sleeping in these blooms and would seek out poppies with this adaptation.

Second, these flowers required less nutrients from the ground, but rather gained nutrients of greater variety and quantity from the people, thereby out competing their soil bound brothers.

By the 120th generation the population had stabilized. The Billet Poppy of today had been invented. It no longer gained nutrients from the soil, but rather solely from the visitation of its only pollinator, people, in its blooming beds.

At this point in 2044, Mayesh Wholesale Flower Group released the Billet Poppy to the market.

In its initial release the Billet Poppy sold at prohibitively extraordinary prices that only the wealthiest could afford. For a time they featured in media as centerpieces of garden bedrooms. Flower beds for comfort and cleanliness; SAD lamps for both the plants and mental health benefits; calming water features; complimentary plant arrangements. They were certainly idyllic in print. However the soil and water required to support such decor also proved effective in supporting weeds and pests in the home.

To some extent there were benefits to this. Bee populations, already back on the rise after  a severe global population dip, greatly benefitted from the increased gardens of the wealthy. The United States topped the globe in terms of deaths caused by bee stings per year. Rodent populations that previously did not benefit from human expansion suddenly started to grow. Various mice and rat species have always found means of cohabiting in human dwellings, but now gophers, groundhogs, ground squirrels, marmots, and voles had places as wealthy pests. California Community Colleges were the first in the nation to offer comprehensive pest control courses to fill the increased demand for exterminators.

The image of flower beds as an interior design choice, while practically wanting, still hasn’t left this continent’s general aesthetic zeitgeist.

A few years after their release, a practical design use of the Billet Poppy emerged in the markets. In hindsight, the choice was obvious, but being so much less exciting, it took a few years to actually appear. The Billet Poppies were planted in actual gardens, as lounge chairs and day beds. While initially this seems more natural, more practical, it also faced logistical hurdles. The poppies, which fed on the sleepers, required more nutrients than the occasional nap could provide. Rich gardeners needed either to set aside regular nap schedules to maintain only a handful of poppies or constantly replace them with new flowers.

A clever solution: paid nappers. Ultra-wealthy didn’t maintain their own gardens. They paid gardeners. So, gardeners became paid to nap. Truly a dream job.

Soon, not only did the presence of Billet Poppies in the garden become a signal of wealth and class, so too did the presence of the paid napper. Nappers were hired for their appearance, charm, and aesthetic addition to the garden as a whole. They were expected to be asleep when guests arrived. This did, however, add further price barriers to the cultivation of the poppy. Some, who could afford the poppies, but not the napper, began to tolerate travelers, vagabonds, or other segments of the general homeless population to squat on their property.

By 2060, about 15 years after their initial market release, the hermit returned to estates across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. By this point too the price of the flower had dropped significantly. Still expensive, but not prohibitively so, such that most of the upper middle class had at least one homeless resident on their land.

Now they were normal. Communities across the continent wanted to cultivate them. Parks departments and development nonprofits began to pool resources to plant Billet Poppies in city parks. Initially, communities envisioned local residents providing enough nappers to support the poppy populations in these parks. However, homeless populations quickly moved in, flower beds being more comfortable than other arrangements. Police removed them.

Communities then had to reckon with the same issues in their parks that the wealthy had dealt with a decade previous. The poppies in parks began to die. Communities could not provide enough nappers to feed the poppies, especially not during inclement weather and less comfortable seasons. City populations began to accept their homeless populations in order to maintain their parks. Due to the cleaning quality of this flower, cities found their homeless populations not only healthier, but less unsightly. City officials who, only a few years prior had ordered police to push out the homeless, now touted the humanitarian benefit of their parks programs.

By 2070 every city in North America was beautified by the perpetual bloom of Billet Poppies.

After the global recession of 2072, homeless populations grew. Religious leaders and community organizers began to act. Stake presidents took the greatest issue, galvanizing Utah on the path to addressing its homeless population in line with church doctrine. In concert with the Mormon Church and Deseret Industries, a bipartisan band of Utah legislators and municipal executors resumed efforts from earlier that century to solve their homeless crisis to resounding success. Once again, Utah had eliminated its homeless population.

In 2073, Salt Lake City burned. Citizens rioted over the death of their Billet Poppies.