Long ago, in the sprawling farmland south of Sun City, there lived a family by the name of Memphis: Big Ray, his boys Cyrus and Seth, and his daughters Nell and Isa. After their mother left town, the girls took on an increasingly motherly role despite being the youngest of the family. Nell in particular worked closely with her father to manage the farm, while the boys provided manual labor, and Isa learned to cook and clean.
Big Ray Memphis was known far and wide as something of a magician. He had an uncanny way with plants that few could understand and none could replicate. He talked to his crops and his trees, as many farmers do, but his plants actually listened. Or they seemed to anyway. It wasn’t the plants themselves responding to Big Ray, however; it was their legions of microscopic pixies, self-replicating relics of a bygone age when magic was still the servant of mankind, not yet its master.
Ordinarily, these tiny machines would operate on their own inscrutable design, but if you had the proper access credentials—like a secret name you’d state to prove your worth—then pixies would follow whatever commands you might give them.
Nell and Isa were like two peas in a pod, so close in age and appearance that they were often mistaken for twins. Both of them wanted to be just like their Daddy, with magical pixies at their command. Nell was good-hearted about it, but Isa resented Big Ray for keeping his secret name from them. If only he’d promised to tell them when they were older, Isa could have lived with that. But no, he’d make a speech all high and mighty: “The little folk know best. Meddling with their intelligence system always does more harm than good, one way or another. Trust the algorithm.” But the girls knew Big Ray still “meddled.” It was just that he didn’t trust anybody else with that kind of power.
One night, Nell came to bed looking like she had the whole world figured out. “I know how to get Daddy to spill his secret name,” she told Isa. “Out in the fig grove, there’s one tree that started drying up, just in the past couple of days. If Daddy don’t set some pixies to working on it, it’s bound to die before long.”
Isa saw where Nell was headed and continued her thought: “So if we can watch him when he makes his rounds tomorrow…”
“If we can just keep out of sight…”
“…then he’s bound to use his secret name to fix that tree!”
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