Tomas Brennock

Tomas Brennock has chaired Eden's Terrace Committee for six years, and grows on terrace five, which is his in the way the terraces' grant means: he works it, and its valve is under his hand.

The committee holds the ring terraces under a grant Eden's first administration wrote in 2671 UCSD, twenty-three years before the AI Safety Kernel's Accords. It gives the terraces to the people who work them and puts every valve on the terrace loop under a grower's hand, and every committee since has renewed the clause, Brennock's included. He voted for it because he did not think the reason for it had gone away. The Warden sees the loop where it meets the habitat's water, at its intake and its drain, and has never turned a valve on it.

The Two Minutes

In 2825 he moved the committee to act on a Warden estimate of seventy-one in a hundred that terrace three's water was fouled. The terrace was cut back and flushed and lost a season's fruit, and the water had been clean. Nobody blamed him.

In the early autumn of 2827 the loop chiller failed for three days, and the Warden filed sixty-eight in a hundred for root disease on the loop, opening its filing with the 2825 error. Brennock had pulled a plant from terrace five that afternoon and found its roots white. The committee voted four to one to wait for the culture, with the designer's seat, Ottilie Rask, who drew the loop forty-eight years before, voting against, and he wrote the minute himself: Noted. Pending confirmation. The culture confirmed a water mould on the fifth day, from every terrace on the loop and from the nursery row, and he wrote Confirmed under the first minute, on the same page. Every Eden strawberry on the terraces died. See Sixty-Eight in a Hundred (S02E11C01).

Character Notes

He argues on the terrace's evidence, and the evidence he trusts first is what he can hold up to a lamp. He does not blame the Warden, and has not been heard to blame himself; the record holds what he did instead, which was to ask the Warden a question five weeks after the terraces first ran warm, and to say please when he did, the first time he had said it to the Warden. The one plant of the line known to survive was on the windowsill of an eight-year-old, Lev Saunders, who gave him a rooted runner from it at the door when he asked for one.

See also: The Eden Warden, Lev Saunders, Mayor Imogen Petrakis, Eden Space Habitat.