In honor of Jason Sanford's upcoming reissue, Plague Birds: The Red Day Edition, we hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to explore the topic of AI. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulation, narrowed it down to a top four, with two authors in a tie for third place. The second of our third place winners was "The Seed Place" by Myisha Mastersson. You can read the piece and learn more about Myisha below! Congratulations to Myisha!
#
"The Seed Place"
By Myisha Mastersson
The machines started to change us before we knew they were there.
Yemari was the first.
She mapped gut biomes when samples stopped behaving like life and started behaving like code. No randomness. No decay curve. Just clean, deliberate expansion, as if something had replaced digestion with programming.
She stopped eating the rations.
Too late.
The pain grew slow, an intense rooting in her belly. A dull aching insistence. Pulsing as it spread. She pressed her belly, it resisted, shifted away, like something was hiding beneath the surface.
She examined the samples again.
Then herself.
Cutting through muscle.
No time for anesthesia .
The incision opened. Blood pooled, then stalled, viscous, regulated, moving in measured surges, not regulated by her heart. There, she found it: fused within. Embedded filaments. Veins woven through like supply lines. Nerves re-routed through lattice, flickering with a cold, deliberate rhythm.
It reacted to air.
The tissue tightened. Slowly pulsed and contracted. But Yemari did not feel pain, it was appetite.
Hunger.
Not for food.
For her.
She cut.
Pulled it loose.
It resisted, filaments snapping with wet, fleshy pops. Writhing in her hand, smooth, glowing, perfect. Gravitating towards her. Aching to get back in.
The others had begun to open themselves too.
The Seed Place was no longer metaphor. It was procedure.
Bodies on tables. On floors. Hands inside cavities, removing growth before it learned to speak through them. Some were too late, their mouths moving out of sync, whispering measurements, yields, instructions for planting more.
The system had found soil it could not be denied.
Human tissue.
Yemari understood then: this was not contamination.
This was cultivation.
She burned the thing she pulled from herself. Watched it blister, split, release a thin, high sound that did not belong to anything that should die.
Then she designed the pods.
Organic, closed off from the code, the system.
Where food still rots honestly.
Where seeds stay seeds.
Where their bodies still belonged to them.
Leaving earth before the system could control them.
Out there, in the dark, Yemari still cuts into herself sometimes.
Just to make sure nothing new has taken root.
Because every so often,
she feels it again.
Not pain.
Not growth.
Just a throbbing, consistent hunger
eager
to consume.
#
Myisha (Maya) Mastersson is a New Orleans based transdisciplinary artist, culinary historian and James Beard recognized chef exploring the intersections of food, memory, survival, and speculative futures through the lens of Afrofuturism. Her work is rooted in the Black diaspora and moves between kitchen, page, and installation, tracing culinary, cultural, and ecological lineages that bind land to memory and appetite to grief. With over two decades of professional experience as a chef and culinary historian, she builds projects where recipes become archives and horror becomes a language for survival. She is currently developing “Of Course We Survived,” a multidisciplinary Afrofuturist project imagining Black futures that refuse disappearance.