***
From her pad, Stabby follows the tortuous progress of the rescue mission.
Sparky is driving a lot more slowly than usual, turning into side roads and doubling back to avoid notice and pursuit.
Time is running out and if they get caught, that’s it, end of the line: the installation will be incomplete, all their efforts will have been for nothing.
And the worst is that zie can do nothing about it: the naked cyclists are not responding to zir messages and zie has no other nearby units that would be able to run interference and steer the police any other way.
“Come on, fam… Come on…” zie whispers to zirself, eyes glued to the screen.
The bright yellow dot of Sparky’s transponder inches closer, slower and slower. Her van finally arrives, with Leccy and her crew on board, but she is not there.
“She’s right behind us,” a ginger hipster reassures, but the road is empty.
Five tense minutes pass until another van barrels into the square, sparks flying from one of its wheels.
“Gods, she made it!” Sprouty exclaims.
The front left tyre is so flat that the metal rim is dragging on the tarmac and, rather than stopping, the van grinds to a painful halt amid the thunderous applause of the members of the Commando.
Sparky slides out of the driver’s seat, stumbling like a drunk, bathed in sweat, but here is a victorious grin on her face as she lets her friends hug her and pat her on the back.
“Fast and Furious has nothing on me.”
“You were awesome!” Stabby agrees, grinning almost as widely. Zie wishes there was more time to celebrate zir friend’s feat of bravery and ability, but it’s half past four and the sun will be up in less than an hour. They are too close to miss their target.
“Someone fix that van! Everybody else, let’s unload and set up. We’re nearly there!” zie orders.
“On it!” one of Prof Racket’s mates exclaims. Stabby remembers that in real life he works as a car mechanic.
The central stela is the largest one, twice as large as the others, and it is nearly an “all hands on deck” job just to get it out if the van and into the pulley rig. It’s backbreaking, but ultimately worth every drop of sweat, every molecule of lactic acid.
There it finally stands in its allotted place, gleaming with colour and gold, a celebration of the city and a monumental, dazzling “fuck you” to the people who were supposed to talk there on the morrow and all they stand for.
The members of the Commando stand before it with a mixture of pride and awe: they can hardly believe they did it.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Loopy comments.
“Of course it is. You designed it,” Stabby replies.
Zie is pretty proud of zir scientific accomplishments, but this… this is something larger than zir, than any of them. The moment feels solemn, almost sacred, and fills zir with a joy so fierce and sharp that it is almost painful. Zie cannot help the tears that spill out of zir eyes.
Loopy embraces zir, letting zir hide zir masked face against his shoulder.
The sky is starting to grow lighter in the East, velvety black fading to lighter and lighter shades of grey. Hints of pink start to creep in at the edges. It’s nearly half past five in the morning.
“We need to go, folks.” Sprouty’s voice breaks the magic, dripping with regret.
Stabby wipes zir eyes with the back of zir hand and nods.
“Let’s move, before they catch us on the way out.”
The Commando retreats in good order, filing out of the square towards their safe places in their now-empty vans.
***
The Sun pays them no heed and continues to rise, painting the sky with a thousand shades of crimson, vermillion, and gold, and as it climbs upwards through the heavens, waking up birds, trees, and all manners of creatures, its rays start to hit the stelae.
Photons bounce through the solar concentrators like steel balls in a pinball machine and finally hit the high-efficiency, multilayer, mini solar panels hidden in the joins between the concentrators.
Photoelectrons cascade between the different layers, amplified at each step, like an avalanche gaining speed as it rolls.
Electricity courses through the cables laid out in the garden, flowing towards the Raspberry Pis, the hard drives, and the speakers.
Music starts to play, a jaunty electro-swing song, filling the air with its lively rhythm and the defiant sound of trumpets.
The first Vigili arrive soon, lured by the sound. After that long night of insanity, they look exhausted and ready to arrest the Pope if he looked at them the wrong way. They expect more people in costumes, or drunks, or nudists, but what they find leaves them completely stunned.
Piazza della Scala has turned into a garden overnight, as if by magic. Grass grows soft and inviting where the flagstones should have been, and flowers fill their senses with a riot of colours and smells.
Please, step on the grass, a small placard says, penned in an ornate, elegant script, but the officers don’t dare.
If you step in the land of faeries, you might never come back… one of them thinks.
Among the grass and flowers, a group of freestanding, stained glass windows gleams in the morning sun.
It is as if someone had stripped down a cathedral to its essential elements and planted it in the middle of a garden, thinks another, who had briefly attended the Fine Arts Academy before giving up art for a career in law enforcement.
The ten lateral panels depict events from the history of the city, forming a sort of nave leading up to a huge central piece: the Austrians build the Teatro Alla Scala, Byzantines fight against Ostrogoths, Queen Theodelinda of the Longobards has her son Athaloald crowned in the old Circus, Roman engineers build the Forum, Insubrian merchants trade with long-haired Etruscans from Genova and bearded Greeks from Marseilles, citizens from all countries in the world arrive to work and study, sightsee and live. All the people who have made Milan their own are represented.
On the huge altarpiece, a blond, tattooed Insubrian chieftain and a distinctively African Hannibal Barca stand underneath the sacred hawthorn tree of Belisama on the eve of the Second Punic War. They clasp their hands in alliance, under the benevolent gaze of the goddess, whose golden insignia gleam among the foliage.
Milan Welcomes Everybody, declares a large banner that hangs from the Mayor’s balcony, penned in the same hand as the placards.
***
While the Vigili are paralysed by their almost-mystical experience, people pass by along via Manzoni, retail workers on their way to the shops, early morning tourists, late-night partygoers dragging themselves home at dawn. They stop, gape in awe, and take a picture. Many end up on Instagram or Facebook. The images go viral in a matter of minutes, pinging across the globe via the internet.
An early spike in Japan is produced by a quartet of friends from Osaka, who are in Milan on a leg of the one-month tour of Europe they organised for their retirement. Minako, who has worked 40 years as a graphic designer in a magazine and has a certain eye for art, realises immediately she has stumbled on something truly unique. She snaps a picture with her phone and sends it straight to her daughter, who is a dealer of contemporary art, and she in turn manages to get it immediately published on an influential Japanese art blog.
Before long, its English-speaking counterparts are taking up the piece of news and dragging their local correspondents out of bed to obtain a fuller coverage of the extraordinary clandestine installation. They get beaten to the best spots in the crowd by the reporters from the city’s main newspapers, duly alerted via an anonymous call from Webby.
The crowd increases with every passing minute. Cameras snap endlessly as people wander through the garden, admiring the art and enjoying the lush greenery. A few people sit down with drinks and ice creams, enjoying the music. A garden is a garden, after all, even though this one is temporary and illegal. It’s just a better reason to seize the moment.
&nbs
p; ***
By the time the law enforcement gets its collective act together, it is quite clear that they will have their work cut out for them to clear up the crowds and remove the installation without causing a major public disturbance. It will be impossible to do both in time for the right-wing demonstration to happen as scheduled and it’s too late to move it to a different venue.
The trucks carrying the stage and AV equipment start to arrive, but they have to be turned back. There is no space for them to park safely and the last thing they want is a confrontation between the right-wingers and the public, especially since the first representatives from the antifascist counter-protest have begun to appear.
The Mayor arrives on the scene a while later. She takes a good, long look at the newly redecorated Piazza, takes a deep breath of flower-scented air, then crosses the garden to her office.
“I am deeply sorry, but the demonstration has to be cancelled and will have to be re-scheduled to a later date,” she informs the organizers, glad that she is not video-calling them, because she wouldn’t be able to hide her grin.
If it had been up to her, she would never have given them the authorisation to organise anything, but higher directives had bound her hands. Secretly she is glad that the Commando has done the dirty job for her. They really have gone all the way with their madness this time.
She immediately issues a very ambiguous declaration that does not condemn or approve the whole stunt and gives vague instructions to restore the square to its former state.
No matter how much she likes them, the Commando Jugendstil have graduated to organised crime with last night’s events. She can’t declare for them, but she doesn’t have to.
She knows for sure that, as soon as the news is out, there will be a petition asking for the art installation to be preserved. The pressure will mount, and she will have to bow to it and keep the blasted garden.
“What a hard job…” she thinks, stifling a laugh as she stretches in her chair.
From the window she can still hear the music. Suddenly being in the office on a summer Sunday morning doesn’t seem half as bad.
***
Commando Jugendstil is a real-life small collective of Italian solarpunk creators who aim to conjugate green technology and art to make cities a better place to live in and build creative communities.
Tales From the EV is a posse of emigrant Italian writers who specialise in historical fantasy, archanepunk and scriptwriting for comics. This is their first foray in the realms of solarpunk.
The Heavenly Dreams of Mechanical Trees
by Wendy Nikel
Trees were never intended to be sentient beings, or God would have created them that way, back in the Garden.
Ailanthus ponders this sometimes as the sun’s rays prickle her leaves’ tiny solar panels and the tubules of her stems absorb the afternoon’s deluge. If the Tree of Knowledge had a voice, would it have cried out to warn the Tempted? Or would it, too, have been deceived by the Serpent and the false promises falling from its golden, forked tongue? Had it spoken, might the Tree have saved its offspring? In a way, the trees’ first parents had failed them, too.
Though admittedly, Ailanthus is not a natural tree, composed of wood and leaf and bark. No, she was created by another hand, forged of copper and steel and gold, in a factory not far from the Wind Forest. Its fumes are familiar to her. As soon as they’re inhaled, they’re processed through her leaves and exhaled again in a form fresh and renewed. The humans planted her here, she and her brethren—miles and miles of eight-armed trees-that-aren’t-trees in a forest-that-isn’t-a-forest. A second Eden, created to save the world.
Whether the other trees spend their days in philosophical ponderings, Ailanthus has no way to know. Though her branches scrape theirs when the wind blows just right and their roots are irreversibly entangled, their creators gave them no means by which to communicate, so their solidarity is one of silence. Thus, Ailanthus spends her days processing the air, dreaming her dreams, and wondering what she’d say if she had the words.
Something—no, someone stirs at the edge of the forest and Ailanthus shifts her attention from the skies, from the impossible flight of black-feathered birds and the way they pick the copper from her leaves’ veins for their nests high in her cloud-closest branches.
***
“—with enough energy to power a hundred households for a hundred years in each and every tree.”
“They’re not trees.” Bita’s voice was hostile, accusatory. She knew how she sounded, but she didn’t care. She hadn’t wanted to come here anyway. The trees here cast eerie crisscrossed shadows and the wind whistling through their branches seemed a whisper of warning.
“Bita.” Aunt Gigi’s disapproval manifested itself in gradually deepening lines. Each wrinkle was unique: some longer, some thicker, some that oddly hooked themselves about along the contours of her face.
That, Bita thought, is how a tree’s branches ought to be.
“Well, they’re not trees,” Bita said. “Not real ones, anyway. The real ones were each different. Complex and magnificent. Not like these things. These aren’t even plants; they’re machines—cold and hard and ugly.”
“You know how long it took to build this wind forest? Decades. If it weren’t for these trees and the others of their kind, Earth would be a wasteland. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Bita said, trying to keep the annoyance from her voice. Since she was small, she’d listened to her aunt’s lectures about the bark beetles whose population, unchecked in increasingly milder winters, had decimated the world’s pine and spruce before moving on to other trees. “That’s why I wanted to study botany.”
“Botany.” Aunt Gigi snorted. “Why waste your time studying the things of the past? We need intelligent young people like you to continue the march of progress, to increase efficiency, to solve the problems of rusting roots and corroding xylem and phloem and… and these birds! Shoo! Go away! Menaces, all of them, but they’re endangered species now, so what can you do? There, doesn’t that sound like a problem for a scientist to solve? How to keep them from picking apart our trees without driving them into extinction as well? Or better yet, figure out how to make these trees reproduce so we don’t have to replace their rusting and broken parts every decade.”
Bita had stopped to study one of the trees’ eight identical branches. Sure, it carried out the chemical processes of a real tree—photosynthesis, respiration, transpiration—and even produced a “green” source of energy as a byproduct, but calling these mechanical structures “trees” was like calling a light bulb the sun.
“Please, Bita. At least consider it. We’re terribly understaffed. We could use your help, and I know you could use the work.”
Bita sighed and placed her hand on the nearest tree’s trunk. Through the steel bark, she sensed the rushing fluids, the transference of energy pounding through the metal like a cold, mechanical heartbeat. And somehow, deep within the vibrations, somewhere among the hums and clicks and whirring of parts, Bita swore she heard a quiet voice say, “Please.”
***
Ailanthus knows she’s not long for this world. The harsh corrosion of her inner, movable parts produces friction and uncomfortable burns. The birds have stolen the copper from her uppermost leaves again this spring, yet not one of the trees’ keepers have come around to replace them. Without these sun-nearest panels in optimal condition, she functions more slowly, barely eking out two-thirds of the energy she’d once produced each day.
The Creator once commanded the trees to reproduce: the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth. Perhaps His blessing is what the steel forest lacks. There was no booming, powerful “Let there be” as Ailanthus and her brethren rolled across the conveyer belt and down the assembly line, as branches were welded to trunks. There was no anointing of their roots as they were placed in the ground, no sprinkling of holy water on their leaves.
Nothing but indifferent mechanical procedures and wearying nine hour shifts and the afterthought, generations later, of fruit and seed and renewal and the bitter realization that what was once deemed the world’s greatest solution was really no solution at all.
***
“I told you, Steve, they want me to do the impossible. They think a botanist is some sort of wizard, some sort of Dr. Frankenstein to bring dead objects to life.” As she passed by each tree, Bita placed her palm on it, just long enough to hear the rumble of its inner workings. In the months she’d been working at the Wind Forest, she’d done this to each tree she passed but had never experienced that small, pleading voice again. Either she’d imagined it, or she was going crazy. Mama would’ve said it was a sign, a message from God, but Bita hadn’t believed in that sort of thing for years, since her prayers for Mama’s recovery had gone unanswered.
“These forests were supposed to solve the earth’s problems,” she said, frowning, “but we’ve only created more. The factories that manufacture new trees and replacement parts are using more energy than these worn-down acres can produce. They want me to make magic, to make these trees self-replicate like the trees of the old days used to.”
“What if you had a seed?” Steve asked. “An acorn, or a piece of fruit, or pinecone? Could you do it then?”
Bita sighed, recalling all the seeds lost in the electrical fire at Svalbard. “If I had a seed? A real, viable seed? One that somehow, by some miracle, wasn’t destroyed by the blight? Well, we wouldn’t need these broken-down scraps of metal then, would we? It would take some time, but we could fill these rusted forests with living trees instead. Can you imagine? No more rust, no more clanking of branches when the wind blows, no more harsh glimmer of the afternoon sun reflecting off the metal panels. They say that the old trees used to have their own unique scents, that you could tell by just smelling whether you were in a forest of maple or cedar or pine. And the fruit—”
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