At three o'clock in the morning, drizzling rain shrouded the old town of Boston. Claire Carter inserted the last bunch of artificial white lilies into a glass vase. Suddenly, her phone screen lit up, and a private message from her friend Emily popped up on social media: "Don't buy the everlasting flowers from that store!"
The message was sent three days ago, and now Emily was lying comatose in the ICU of Massachusetts General Hospital.
Claire's hands trembled as she clicked on the video her friend had sent. In the footage, on Emily's dining table, a dozen white lilies bloomed serenely in the candlelight. Abruptly, the camera shook violently, and Emily's scream pierced the silence: "The petals... they're moving!"
The next morning, Claire stormed into the "Eternal Spring" flower studio, clutching the video screenshot. Tucked away in a corner of Quincy Market, the store's window displayed hundreds of flowers that never wither. The petals of the roses glistened like pearls, and the dewdrops on the lily of the valley seemed to refract rainbows. When she told the store owner about Emily's ordeal, the man with gold-rimmed glasses gave her a meaningful smile. "Ms. Carter, do you believe plants can have memories?"
The man introduced himself as Alexander Gray. Behind his lenses lurked a past unknown to others. Twenty years ago, he was the youngest professor in the Department of Bioengineering at Harvard University. Together with his wife, Isabella, they dedicated themselves to the study of plant neurology. Isabella had an almost obsessive passion for everlasting flowers. She dreamed of cultivating blooms that would never fade, freezing beauty in time. However, a catastrophic laboratory accident claimed Isabella's life, leaving behind only incomplete experimental notes and a mutated plant sample.
After that, Alexander vanished from the academic world. When he resurfaced, he had opened the "Eternal Spring" flower shop in Boston. On the surface, he sold exquisite artificial flowers, but in reality, a secret laboratory lay hidden in the basement. Using the sample Isabella left behind, combined with bioengineering technology, he attempted to merge plants with artificial materials, striving to create true "everlasting flowers."
"These are our latest Memory Foam Artificial Flower series," the store owner said, rotating the display stand. A dozen blue-purple irises unfurled slowly under the spotlight. "Utilizing NASA space foam technology, they can'remember' their arranged shapes. Watch this—" He gently bent a petal, and when he released it, the petal slowly returned to its original position, as if it were alive.
Claire's eyes were drawn to the black rose in the corner. Its deep purple hue bordered on ink-black, with metallic vines coiling around the stem. The edges of each petal glowed with an eerie blood-red. Just as she reached out to touch it, her phone vibrated. A message from the hospital arrived: Emily's condition had suddenly deteriorated.
That night, Claire placed the black rose on her study windowsill. Moonlight streamed through the glass, casting spiderweb-like shadows on the petals. In the small hours of the morning, she was jolted awake by a faint rustling sound. In the darkness, the rose slowly turned towards the moonlight, and the metallic vines let out a soft clicking sound, like gears turning.
Over the next week, eerie incidents piled up. Claire noticed purple bruises appearing on her neck in the mirror, and damp petal imprints constantly showed up on her coffee cups. Worst of all, every night, the black rose exuded an odor similar to decaying humus, and a sticky liquid oozed from between its petals.
"It's because you haven't 'fed' it regularly," the store owner's voice came over the phone, dripping with a chilling tenderness. "The memory foam needs to absorb organic substances to maintain its shape, such as... human skin flakes, sweat, or..." He paused, "fresh blood."
Claire collapsed to the floor, her phone dropping beside the black rose. To her horror, the blood on the petals was fading, replaced by a strange golden pattern, resembling the calligraphy on medieval manuscripts. As she leaned in for a closer look, the rose trembled violently, and a petal sliced precisely across her fingertip.
Just then, the doorbell rang. The police burst into the room with a search warrant. The female officer in charge held up an evidence bag. "Ms. Carter, we found your call records on Emily's phone. Her last voice message before losing consciousness said, 'Black rose... Claire... danger'."
Claire's gaze was suddenly drawn outside the window. In the shadows across the street, the owner of "Eternal Spring" held an identical black rose, the golden patterns on its petals perfectly matching those on hers. When the female officer followed her gaze, all she saw was an empty street.
"These aren't artificial flowers at all," Claire grabbed the female officer's arm. "They're some kind of parasitic plants, disguised as products with memory foam technology!" Before she could finish, the entire bunch of black roses lunged at her. The metallic vines wrapped around her wrists, and the petals clung to her skin like suction cups.
In the chaos, the female officer shot and shattered the vase. Strangely, the black liquid that splattered on the wall formed a set of coordinates—a deserted greenhouse on the coast of Maine.
When the SWAT team stormed into the vine-covered building, the sight that greeted them was terrifying. Thousands of glass jars filled with waist-high flower stems were submerged in liquid, and at the top of each stem bloomed artificial flowers identical to those from "Eternal Spring." Surveillance footage showed these "flowers" crawling out of the jars at night and infiltrating homes through ventilation ducts.
In the basement safe, the police discovered Alexander's diary. His handwriting grew increasingly distorted over time, filled with yearning for Isabella and the insane obsession of "letting life continue within the flowers." It turned out that his so-called "everlasting flowers" were an attempt to infuse human life force into plants, creating entities that straddled the line between biology and machinery—"immortal beings."
Three months after the case was cracked, the design blueprints of "Eternal Spring" fetched a sky-high price at Christie's. The successful bidder was a multinational biotech company, which claimed it would apply this "revolutionary material" in the medical field. In a private laboratory in Boston, improved versions of the memory foam artificial flowers were quietly growing in a sterile environment. This time, their "source of nourishment" was no longer limited to humans.
At the end of the story, Claire received an anonymous package. Inside the plain white box, a dozen everlasting lily of the valley swayed gently in the moonlight. A card with gold-embossed calligraphy read, "True eternity comes from the perfect symbiosis of technology and nature." The moment she placed the flowers in the vase, the lily of the valley let out a clear, tinkling sound, as if playing a silent lullaby.
Now, you too can own this beauty that transcends life and death. Click the link below to purchase the new generation of memory foam artificial flower series, certified safe by the EU, and let the never-fading fragrance brighten every morning and evening.