Nobody remembered who built the glasshouse, which was strange, because the ledger remembered everything else.
Ideas arrived at the door the way seeds arrive anywhere — carried in on someone's sleeve, half-formed, insisting they were already trees.
The old way had been to plant them wherever they landed. The founder had a graveyard of that era: repos with three commits and a beautiful README, each one a sapling that had been loved for a weekend and then left to the frost of the next idea.
So the glasshouse had rules, and the rules had teeth.
A seed did not get soil by being exciting. It got a tray, a tag, and a gate. The tray was small on purpose. "You get to be real," the glasshouse said, "one checkpoint at a time."
The seed would complain — seeds always complained — that it was destined for the canopy, that the tray insulted its ambition. The glasshouse had heard this from every seed that later became nothing, and from every seed that later became everything, and had noticed the speeches were identical. So it stopped listening to speeches and watched only what grew.
Some seeds hated the gates and withered out of spite. Fine. Better a small honest death in the tray than a large slow one in the field. Some grew crooked, and the antagonists — the glasshouse kept a panel of them, professionally unimpressed — would circle the stem and say this branch is load-bearing on a lie, and the branch came off, and the plant was better for it, and never thanked them, and that was fine too.
And once in a while a thing in a tray got too big for the glass. Roots pressing the seams. That was the only signal the glasshouse trusted — not enthusiasm, not a roadmap, just pressure against the walls.
People asked the founder what the glasshouse actually produced, since nothing that mattered stayed inside it.
"Exactly," he said.