GREENLIT

We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.

24 FEBRUARY 2025

THE WINDSWEPT PRAIRIE stretches wide and gold on either side of the access road as the Maybach glides past a simple wire-frame gate and a weather-worn, unmanned security shack. Beyond the gate, broad fields stretch toward the horizon, dotted with workers in coveralls tilling soil, laying irrigation lines, and preparing the land for spring planting. Rows of greenhouses and outbuildings sprawl behind them like quiet sentinels.

Ahead, the main complex rises in a cluster of ranch-style prefab buildings clad in matte white corrugated siding. Their pitched roofs glint beneath the cold, sharp-blue Colorado sky. A line of white barns extends from the back, like lungs breathing out heat and vapor into the morning air. The place isn’t high-tech. It isn’t sterile. It’s purpose-built. Clean, functional, and alive with quiet motion.

A green stenciled sign on the fence reads:

GREENLIT CANNABIS COMPANY
EST. 2019

The font is soft, unthreatening—rounded and slightly chipped, as if to reassure you: yes, you’re in the prairie, but yes, there’s a vibe here.

Odion, silent as ever, eases the car down an unpaved road bordered by rough wooden fencing and native grasses—switchgrass, Indian paintbrush, patches of early sprouting rye. The occasional sunflower husk still clings to the dry stalks from last season. The facility feels half like an agricultural co-op, half like an artists' colony—especially with the hand-painted murals on the barn siding and solar panels shimmering like dragonfly wings above the rooftops.

From the front seat, our other passenger swings around the middle console with a mop of black hair flopping over his face. “Oh my god!” he says in a rushed, excited voice. “This is so lit, Ms. Gorgo. Thank you for this opportunity!”

That’s Steve Goldberg. He used to be an intern at UPRISING before it shuttered. Since then he’s been serving time at Stanford University. Don’t let that cute puppy dog face fool you—he’s a smart kid. Ignorant, yes. Naive, yes. But he has displayed a surprising aptitude with computers. Fortunately he’s also failing every class that wasn’t tech related, so the moment I dangled the opportunity to join my team at Bifrost, he practically sold me his soul in gratitude.

I glance at him through my Dior sunglasses and say, “I’m the one who should be thanking you, Steve. I have a feeling that big brain of yours will prove rather useful in dealing with these people.”

He starts to turn forward but pauses, brow creased. “Are they bad people, Ms. Gorgo?”

“Oh,” I say, smiling slightly, “not all of them. But one employee in particular isn’t thrilled that Tony Savage sold GreenLit to me and he’s been dragging his feet on giving us network access.”

“It’s bullshit,” Emilia says, sliding her tablet into a slouchy black leather tote. “He’s hiding something.” She leans toward Steve just slightly—enough to tilt her blouse open at the collar, revealing a lace edge and a hint of blood-red ink curling over her clavicle. “And you were the smart young man who found it for us, aren’t you?”

He gulps. “Uh… yes!”

The Maybach glides into a gravel lot that crunches softly beneath the tires. Ahead rises a massive log-built lodge with river rock chimneys and timber balconies, its gabled roofline pitched proudly against the open prairie sky. The logs are rich with age, darkened by winter storms and sun, and the trim around the wide front windows is hand-carved. A low stone wall borders the walkway, where early spring crocus and daffodils have begun to bloom, defiant against the frost still clinging to the shaded soil.

Emilia leans across me to look out my window. “God, this place reeks of kombucha and stubborn optimism.”

Odion opens the door without a word. I step out and take in the rustic absurdity: an old-school hitching post, now used as a communal herb stand. A rusted cast iron bathtub overflows with heirloom lettuces, while a rain barrel nearby is painted with an amateur mural of mushrooms and planetary alignments. Windbreaks of native grass rustle along the walk. It all feels curated—like a Whole Earth Catalog threw up and someone called it a business.

Emilia climbs out behind me, sunglasses already in place. Steve follows, backpack jostling, sneakers squeaking as he spins in a wide circle. “Whoa,” he breathes. “This is like… a Wes Anderson movie got high and discovered soil health.”

I say nothing. But my silence is decisive.

She notices.

“It’s worse inside,” Emilia mutters.

A wind chime made of deer antlers and ceramic beads knocks softly above the porch. Twin barrels—once whiskey, now overflowing with ornamental kale and wooly thyme—flank the front steps. One has a tiny wooden sign wedged into the soil. It reads: No Bad Vibes.

The wooden double doors creak open manually, revealing a middle-aged staffer in a bleached lab coat tie-dyed with spirals of sun-faded blue and yellow. She waves cheerfully, a crystal pendant bouncing against her lanyard. Her eyes are too wide, her smile too fixed—equal parts baked and anxious.

“Ms. Gorgo,” she says with a slight bow. “Welcome to GreenLit’s Heart Hub!”

The words make my skin itch.

Emilia enters first without a word, followed by Steve who offers a meak-little wave before scurrying inside.

“Thank you,” I say brightly to the staffer with a smile calculated to convey a friendly energy to offset any nervous concern about my intentions as the new owner of the company. “I’m honored to be here and I appreciate you meeting us at the door, miss…”

“Wilder,” she meeps happily. “Fern Wilder.”

I hold out my hand. “Oh!” she says, surprised by the gesture. Her nimble little fingers and thumb curl around my palm and mine tighten around hers.

“What do you do here, Ms. Wilder?” I ask as our hands briefly shake before slipping apart.

“I’m an R&D Technician, which is a fancy way of saying data collector.” She laughs awkwardly with a wave of her hand.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” I say with a hand on her shoulder. She is surprised at first at my unexpected gesture, but soon relaxes. “One of the many things I’ve learned in my time as a CEO is that the most valuable members of any company are the ones in the trenches, doing the everyday work. Thank you, Ms. Wilder, for everything you do.”

Her defenses melt away and, with a quick pat on her shoulder, I head inside.

The interior lobby expands into a vaulted great room with exposed log beams and broad clerestory windows radiating with sunlight. The walls are paneled with warm, knotty slats of wood, accented by paintings not even fit for a high school art class, paisley patterned tapestries, psychedelic mandalas, and intricate dreamcatchers. Pine and cedar oil dominate the room but beneath the earthy, woody scent is something vaguely medicinal, like kombucha brewed in a beaker over a hot plate. A chalkboard easel by the front desk reads:

TODAY’S VIBRATIONS

• Breathwork in the Solarium
• 2PM Mycelial Meditation
• Chakra Alignment (Upper Levels Only)
• All-Staff Cacao Ceremony – POSTPONED DUE TO GOAT INCIDENT

When Wilder closes the door behind us, the tractor-chugging noisescape of the farm is gently sealed off, replaced with the gentle embrace of low-volume ambience music—somewhere between wind tunnel and whale song.

Wilder hurries in front of us, saying “Follow me and I’ll show you where the magic happens!” She squeaks with a chuckle at the thinly veiled connection between magic and the euphoria gleaned from psychoactive substances.

Steve looks around, wide-eyed. “Whoa. This is like… Tegridy Farms.”

“What’s that?” Emilia says, her voice rising at the end to accentuate her feigned interest, and the flirty shift in her body language as she walks ever so slightly closer to him. She knows what she’s doing.

He spins around and continues backward. “Tegridy Farms! From that really old show, South Park. C’mon, you never seen it? I gotta drive the tractor, gotta cut the grass! Chut-chut goes the baler like it's never gonna last!”

“I never heard of it but it sounds fun. Watch out now.”

“Huh?” he says before tripping backward over a matte terracotta pot, sending him flying hard to the floor with an oomph. 

“Deborah!” Wilder shouts, rushing back, but not to help Steve as he rubs his sore backside. Her concern is for the waist-high rubber plant and its broad, waxy leaves stretching in several self-important directions. One of them is draped in a faded Pride flag bandana. It even has a laminated name tag clipped to the lip of the pot. It reads:

DEBORAH
Vibe Stabilization Officer

Emilia holds a hand out to help Steve up as Wilder fawns over the plant, which has a set of googly eyes glued to its upper stem. It’s also wearing a pair of child-sized sunglasses and a beaded friendship bracelet around its trunk.

It stands just slightly off-center in the lobby walkway. Not enough to justify being in the way. Just enough to be exactly what Steve would trip over.

Wilder sighs from relief. “She’s okay,” she says, then turns to repeat it louder, as if we weren’t the only ones standing in the lobby. “She’s okay! Thank goodness.”

“She?” Steve asks after a sharp oww after getting to his feet.

“Yes, this is Deborah,” Wilder explains. “Our Vibe Stabilization Officer. She is actively processing the energy of the space. Very important. She’s been here since the building opened.”

By the end of the day, that fucking plant is dead.

Wilder leads us through the great room and into a wide corridor that wraps around the rear of the house. Sunlight filters through vintage glass windows, casting rainbow smears across a long braided rug. The walls are adorned with hand-carved totems, fiber art, and framed quotes about regenerative agriculture and plant spirit sovereignty. Somewhere, nearby, someone is playing a wooden flute—badly.

“We really strive to integrate the GreenLit spiritual philosophy into every level of our operation,” Wilder says with the rhythm of someone who’s said that exact line a hundred times. “Sun cycles, lunar pull, bioharmonic alignment… we call it neurobiological reciprocity.”

“Uh-huh,” I muse. Steve meanwhile drifts toward a nook filled with meditation cushions and mason jars full of quartz crystals. Above the arch, the sign proclaims the area the SACRED SANCTUM.

“So this is really where the science happens?” he asks, eyeing a macramé-hung terrarium shaped like a uterus.

“No,” I say. “This is where it’s buried.”

We’re here to exhume it.

Wilder swings open a pine-framed door that leads to a more utilitarian passage, its aesthetic suddenly shifting—no plants, no dreamcatchers, just rough-cut wood walls and exposed copper piping. The floor changes from rustic hardwood to concrete, and the air cools by several degrees.

“Dr. Thorne is in the Lab,” she says, quickening her pace. “It’s below us. We added an elevator for ADA compliance, but there are stairs if you prefer—”

“We don’t,” Emilia says, voice flat.

Wilder swallows her reaction and hustles ahead, leading us toward a narrow brass-paneled elevator that looks comically modern in the midst of all this timber and tapestry. Its display screen flickers faintly. She pulls a wooden keycard from a hand-stitched hemp pouch on her belt and offers it between two fingers.

Emilia snatches it without a word.

“Oh!” Wilder flinches, trying to cover the awkward moment with a chuckle. “Well, Dr. Thorne is just finishing up downstairs. I’ll let him know you’re on your way.” She turns on her heel and practically skips back down the hall, no doubt racing to alert the rest of her little science coven.

Emilia swipes the keycard across the security panel. As the elevator hums to life, her hands fold over one another with her mouth set in a line. Steve stares at the floor, sensing the temperature shift but not understanding it.

When the doors open, cold air rushes upward. I enter first, followed by Emilia and then Steve. There is no sanctity here—only failed ambitions buried under a new age code of ethics.

GreenLit is the last ghost of a dying ideology, and it’s time to clean house.

THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPEN with a metallic groan.

Holistic, back to nature sensibility ends at the threshold. In its place: cold precision of serious science—nothing cute about it. Stainless steel counters, modular bio-containment hoods, rows of glassware under LED task lights. The walls are lined with climate-controlled storage units and negative pressure incubators. A long glass table gleams beneath surgical-grade lighting, flanked by high-backed stools with restraints built in. No mysticism here. Only sharp edges and silence.

At the far end stands Dr. Aris Thorne, Chief Science Officer, still wearing his lab coat like it means something.

He’s in his mid-fifties, white-haired but not dignified, with the sunken look of someone who doesn’t sleep without sedatives. His shirt is tucked but wrinkled. His tie is misaligned by half an inch. His hands never stop moving—adjusting his glasses, smoothing his notes, flicking nonexistent dust off a screen that doesn’t need him.

“Ms. Gorgo,” he says with forced brightness. “Welcome. I’ve prepared a brief overview of our current research efforts, if you’ll allow me—”

“You have three minutes,” I say, smiling. “Impress me.”

He exhales. Clicks the screen.

Behind him, a projector hums and displays a tired PowerPoint template with the GreenLit logo—green leaf, smiley sun, molecular helix—and a title that reads:

Next-Generation Cannabis Applications for Whole-Body Wellness.

Of course it does.

He launches in.

“Here you’ll see our most recent strain lineage, optimized for delta-8 metabolization and terpenoid stability. We’ve seen a 14% increase in yield, especially with field-grown hybrids. Our new cultivar, Limonene Lux, shows a particularly potent anxiolytic profile when combined with guided breathwork. We’re currently pursuing grant co-funding for a pilot study in neuro-harmonic therapy.”

He glances up. I’m not listening.

Neither is Emilia.

Steve is already squinting at the room’s outdated terminal.

“Doctor Thorne,” I interrupt smoothly. “Commendable work within established parameters. However, my interest today lies elsewhere.”

I nod toward Steve.

“Mr. Goldberg requires privileged access to your terminal. He has full archival permissions to view deprecated logs, encrypted folders, and all flagged assets scheduled for deletion.”

Thorne frowns, then his polite confusion cracks into disbelief.

“I… I’m sorry but I must object. That system contains proprietary research. Some of it is sensitive. Access protocols—”

Emilia cuts in. “Are obsolete. Just like the rest of this operation.”

I tilt my head toward Steve. That’s all it takes.

He steps forward, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and cracking his knuckles with a sheepish little grin. “Yeah, um… sorry. IT stuff. Just need a few pings off your local server to confirm asset integrity and hash authentication.”

That awkward ADHD nerd energy hyper focuses on the screen. He’s already sliding into the chair before Thorne can protest again.

“This is highly irregular,” Thorne mutters. “I won’t be responsible for compromised data integrity.”

“Doctor,” I say gently. “Your responsibilities ended the moment I exited that elevator.”

He pales.

Steve’s fingers begin dancing across the keys. The terminal chimes. Command lines open.

He says half to himself, “It's a UNIX system! I know this!”

“What is he talking about?” I ask Emilia. Her face falls into her hand and she sighs.

“Jurassic Park.”

Keyboard clicks echo sharply in the stale air. He proclaims, “I’m in. Partition K-7 is still firewalled but my backdoor has not been compromised.” He stops typing to quickly point at the lines of code. “Here it is—the repurposed dev node I found when I remote accessed the network. Definitely not on the official topology.”

He stops to look up at Emilia with a goofy, asymmetrical grin, like a dog proudly carrying a ball back to its owner.

“Someone deleted the file but they missed the shadow cache.”

Emilia leans over his shoulder. His cheeks redden.

“Open it,” she says.

“Don’t!” Thorne tells Steve. “You don’t understand. That project was buried for good reason.”

Steve’s head swivels from the doctor, then to Emilia, before tilting to look back at me. The boy is so pliable, he can’t decide who to listen to, so I remind him.

“Do it,” I say firmly, with just the right amount of threat behind my voice to assert my will upon him.

“Okay!” he says happily as his hands return to the keyboard.

Over the click-clack of keys and the swivel of a mouse, I say to Emilia, “Darling, do me a favor. If Dr. Thorne tries to interrupt Steve again, break his nose.”

Thorne looks at me, bug-eyed through his glasses, then to Emilia. She straightens up and, with a creeping smile, says simply, “You got it, boss.”

“Guys,” Steve speaks up. “There are some weird internal notes… ‘Project Scarecrow’… whoa, okay…”

He stops. Blinks. And clicks.

A progress bar begins to crawl across the main screen. Old logs unspool. Photos recompile into partial thumbnails. Grainy videos flicker.

Onscreen:
A field of unnaturally vibrant mushrooms pulsing under strobe lights.
A neurograph scan showing near-total prefrontal cortex suppression.
A white rat standing completely still in a mirrored cube, its eyes glassy, its tail twitching in perfect rhythm.

Steve moves the mouse pointer over a folder labeled:

PROJECT SCARECROW – STAGE 3 TERMINATED (INCOMPLETE)

“Oh god,” Thorne whispers. “Impossible… the backups were wiped… I purged the entire system!”

“They were,” Steve replies quietly, scrolling deeper. “But you forgot about the People Under the Stairs, Fool.”

Thorne lurches forward—not at Steve, but at me. “Ms. Gorgo, that project was mothballed by Mr. Savage for a reason. It wasn’t just ineffective. It was destabilizing. We recorded hallucinations. Paranoia. Memory loss. Identity fragmentation.”

He looks at me now, truly afraid.

“It’s unpredictable. Dangerous.”

I approach slowly, the heels of my Manolo Blahnik’s tapping once with each word.

“Unpredictable,” I say. “Only to those without vision. Dangerous? All true power is dangerous, Doctor.”

The images continue: a human subject (blurred), screaming under sedation. Chemical diagrams that don’t look entirely Euclidean. A final note from the archive, recovered in fragments:

“…administered to Subject 03 at 0.3mg/kg… loss of pronoun differentiation… spoke in third person plural… subject identified something called the Mouth…”

I smile.

We’ve found the key.

THORNE’S FACE IS PALE AND PINCHED, a sheen of sweat forming at the hairline no one was polite enough to mention. He hasn’t spoken since the video ended. His fingers twitch at his sides like they want to do something useful but can’t remember how.

I straighten the collar of my blouse and turn away from the terminal. Emilia reaches over Steve to close the browser window with a snap of her fingers against the enter key, like she’s closing a coffin.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I say at last, my voice polite as linen. “That was… enlightening.”

He swallows hard. “Ms. Gorgo, I understand your enthusiasm, but Scarecrow was never meant to move past early stage modeling. The compound’s effects were inconsistent. The side effects—”

“—are promising,” I interrupt. “Hallucinations. Dissociation. Nonlinear perception. All markers of successful psychic destabilization. You tried to suppress the outcome because you were afraid of what it meant. I’m not.”

“I don’t think you understand what you’re dealing with.”

“You didn’t,” Emilia says. “We do.”

Her voice is more subdued than mine, but colder. The kind of cold that slips into the spine and nests there. Thorne turns to her, sees something in her eyes, and finally comprehends the futility of his resistance. He is not going to leave this room with his career intact.

“I’ll need your badge,” I say.

He gasps. “I’m sorry…”

“You’re not. But you will be.”

I step forward and hold out my hand.

Reluctantly, he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a plastic access badge still clipped to a branded lanyard. He hesitates. I don’t move.

The moment stretches too long.

He offers it. I take it. That’s the end of Dr. Aris Thorne.

“Normally, I would have security escort you from the premises,” Emilia says, already typing on her tablet. “Unfortunately, this place doesn’t have security.”

Flabbergasted, Thorne cries between quick breaths, “But… why… why would we… need security guards! We operate under the non-aggression principle!”

Her eyes lift from the tablet. Unfeeling and boundless in disapproval. “We don’t, Mr. Thorne. You will escort yourself from the building at once. Your personal effects will be shipped to your address on file.”

“Oh yeah?” he says with a raised voice. “What if I tell everyone here what you’re trying to do?” It’s a momentary spur of bravado that Emilia squashes without mercy.

“The police will be called,” she says. “You will be arrested for criminal  trespassing on a cannabis cultivation facility, and a felony will make other companies balk at the prospect of hiring you for anything other than janitorial work. How are your toilet-scrubbing skills, Mr. Thorne?”

He doesn’t say anything. He can’t. He’s frozen in fear. Behind his glasses, his eyes are flayed open in disbelief at his life collapsing before him.

She lowers the tablet and softens, slightly. “Leave peacefully. Do not attempt to access any terminals, equipment, or devices on your way out. Your access codes have already been revoked. Do not speak with any employees.”

“Especially Deborah,” Steve suddenly says while spinning in his chair. I almost laugh. Almost.

Emilia smiles, but it's purposefully detached, almost robotic. “You will receive your severance packet in your personal email by end of business. Follow my directions explicitly and it’s yours. Fail to comply with my instructions to the letter and you receive nothing.”

Her arms cross over her chest, hugging the tablet into her embrace. “And don’t ever threaten to break the terms of your NDA again, doctor. Any attempt to do so will be met with swift legal action. We have an entire law firm on retainer that would enjoy picking its teeth with the bones of your life. You will live out the rest of your life indigent, dependent on the kindness of others. In short, we will destroy you.”

“You can’t do this,” he whispers.

I raise an eyebrow.

“Oh, Doctor,” I say with an amused sigh. “It’s done.”

He scoffs, his eyes darting back and forth between me and Emilia, his cheeks bellowing with every breath, but it's a futile display of protest. He throws his hands, saying, “Fine, I’ll go. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when this blows up in your face.”

He storms off with a chip on his shoulder, but his mouth is shut. For his sake, it better stay that way. He takes the stairs, sparing us the awkward moment of him waiting for the elevator.

As the door shuts behind him with a soft whoosh of finality, silence settles in the lab like dust. No one speaks. The only sound is the low hum of a dormant centrifuge and the faint click of Emilia’s nails against her screen as she finishes logging the termination.

Then: a knock.

Not a dramatic one. Measured. Precise. Three soft taps.

A door at the rear of the lab creaks open—one I hadn’t noticed, half-obscured between a stainless steel storage cabinet and the chemical shower station. In steps a small, impeccably composed man in a perfectly tailored lab coat. His posture is straight, his hair neatly parted. Thin, wire-rimmed glasses frame delicate eyes that smile before his mouth does. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, refined, with a slight Beijing accent filtered through American academia.

“Chairperson Gorgo. Thank you for seeing me.”

Dr. Zhi Chen. Polite. Pleasant. And beneath it, the scent of something dangerous—not blood, not chemicals, but a lack of hesitation. An absence of ethics.

“You're early,” I say, turning to face him fully.

“Punctuality,” he replies with a small bow, “is a form of respect.”

Steve looks him up and down. “Whoa. They really upgraded the boss fight.”

Chen tilts his head, visibly amused. “And you must be Mr. Goldberg. The boy who broke my firewall. I’m impressed. And flattered.”

Steve freezes. “Oops… sorry. No offense, I didn’t mean to—”

“I don’t take offense,” Chen says gently. “I take notes.”

He walks calmly to the same terminal Steve used and glances at the recovery screen, now paused on the Scarecrow footage. The corner of his mouth lifts.

“Ah. So that survived. Curious.”

Chen has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Tsinghua University. After graduating, he immigrated to the United States to spearhead a research program at the University of Colorado. Its subject: study the benefits of genetic modification on psilocybin mushrooms for the purpose of medicinal therapy. He joined GreenLit specifically to develop a more powerful strain of psilocybe for the Colorado market, but Tony didn’t have the stomach for it.

The doctor looks back at me. “I would very much like to continue the work. With your permission.”

“Permission is granted,” I say.

He nods once.

“And the compound?”

Chen folds his hands behind his back, as if reciting something long memorized.

“Stable, with adjustments. Solvent is no longer aerosolized. We’re using a nano-encapsulated delivery system now—viscous, self-replicating under the right thermal conditions. Non-particulate. Coats rather than bonds. The mind doesn’t know it’s affected. Not until the waking dreams start.”

Steve lets out a low “whoa.”

“Show me,” I say.

Chen walks to a refrigerated drawer, enters a four-digit code, and removes a small metal vial the size of a lipstick tube. He places it reverently on the quartz table.

It’s filled with a thick, black, iridescent liquid that doesn’t move like fluid—it shimmers in slow, thoughtful ripples, as if it’s listening.

“Unity,” Chen says softly. “Our first viable culture.”

Emilia leans closer. “That’s not a name. That’s a threat.”

“No,” he replies. “That’s marketing. Unity is the culmination of my life’s work. What you see is an extract taken from a unique fungal species I personally engineered. I harvested the most potent psychotropic gene sequences from dozens of Psilocybe strains, discarding nature's crude limitations. Then I synthesized these perfected fragments into its vastly superior genome – one designed to rewrite reality itself."

Emilia turns to me. “Tony didn’t have the stomach for it.”

“Mr. Savage ordered me to destroy it,” Kurado clarifies, “but I could not bear it.” His eyes cast down on the substance, the shifting colors radiating across it like an oil-slick are reflected in the mirrored surface of his eyes.

“It would be like… killing one of my own children.”

All names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this story are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.