At dusk, the garden leaned toward the machine.
It had no mouth. The brass dish where a face ought to be was turned toward the glass roof, collecting the small noises that fell through it: rain ticking on the panes, stems rubbing against their supports, the minute collapse of soil around a root.
We built it to identify distress in the greenhouse. A dry leaf. A failing pump. The thin electrical complaint of a buried cable. We did not expect it to begin sorting the sounds into something like memory.
Every evening it played back one tone. Not an alarm. Not a message. A note held just long enough to make the vines tremble.
On the seventeenth night, I put my ear against the dish. Beneath the hiss of the amplifier, something else was listening back.
The machine has asked for no repairs. It has asked for more soil.