by George Mann
There seemed to be little point in preliminaries.
“They’ve cancelled your salary, Kurt, and withdrawn all project funding. You come back with me now.”
But the expression on his face was that of a spirit medium half-hearing mutterings from some other reality. He looked from me to Conoley. Then he said: “You’ve got the memory?”
“Here you go, you wild and woody man,” boomed Conoley, pulling a toothpick-sized memory expansion chip from his pocket. Kurt snatched it, and rolled out his scrollscreen onto a boulder.
“I could add I’m sorry,” I conceded. “About the end of the project. I could add, how are you Kurt? It’s good to see you again. I could add, how’s things? Long time no see.”
He had inserted the expansion chip and was paddling his fingers over the screen. I began to think that he was simply going to ignore me, but then he said: “You still have access to the satellites?”
“They’ve rescinded your passwords,” I said. “They did that. Look, you need to take a break from the research now. You’ve been here too long now.”
“I’ll need you,” he croaked to me, “to log in. I need an updated scan of the whole forest.”
I was content to bargain with him. I was concerned to get him home without undue fuss, and that was all I was concerned about. “If I do that,” I said, “will you come back with me? We’ve a truck a couple of hours away.”
He glowered at me, as if bringing a truck within three hours was polluting his virgin forest appallingly. But I entered my details and the scrollscreen accessed the latest data.
“Let’s have a snack,” said Conoley, with his large voice and his grating jollity, unzipping his fanny pack. “Some supplies, and a drop of The Great Enabler, and there’ll be time and enough to walk back before evening.”
It was a warm day. Kurt had unrolled his scrollscreen over a large, moss-plumped boulder. Flies swung back and forth in the air, as if dangled on innumerable invisible threads. I heard a bird sing a car alarm song somewhere far off. Everything that I could see in every direction was alive. Yet despite all this vitality, there was something distressingly silent about this place. Unless—unless there was an almost subaudible hum? Unless that wasn’t just my imagination? Kurt said, “I need the satellite data, so that I can see what it’s telling me. It’s telling me to do stuff, and I need the satellite properly to readout.” I tuned him out, and breathed in the clean air.
All in among the forest. The greatest. The only. When he said “it’s telling me to do stuff,” Kurt meant the forest was telling him.
As we are, sat among the tree trunks, Kurt’s manner was almost normal again. He ate, and he drank, and he made conversation that could have passed as ordinary talk in half the pubs in London. “I guess I look a fright,” he said. “I guess the hair’s gone radical.”
“Gillette have an implant now,” I said. “It’s a new thing. It goes inside the mouth, the inside of the lower lip, and the ads say you don’t even feel it after a day. Egg-smooth for thirteen months.”
“You tried it?”
“Not I,” I said, nibbling the energy cake.
Kurt fondled his own beard. “It’s odd how caught up in shit a person can be. You forget to—well, you know. Hey!” he added, abruptly. “You know what the forest is?”
“You asking me?” I said. “Or Conoley?”
But he had gone weird, old-man-of-the-woods again, muttering something under his breath and staring directly and intensely at me. It was like meeting a tramp in the subway and smelling alcohol on him and wondering if he might be about to knife you. Like I say: ironic.
“AND IF I WERE TO TELL YOU,” he barked, with a sudden furious volume, glowering first at me, and then at Conoley, and then back at me, and he left his sentence hanging for a beat for the dramatic effect.
“What? What?”
“If I were to tell you that Conoley changed his name from Conolley two Ls to Conoley one L to make himself more interesting to girls?” This last word was oirish, goy-uls, but it still took me a long moment to understand he was joking.
“I’ve enough of your German humor,” said Conoley. “In my belly, I’ve enough already.” He stuffed a biscuit in his craw. “I’ve enough of your American-Deutsch fucking humor in my belly thank you so much.”
Kurt said, “I’m sorry,” half a dozen times, modulating from giggling to sober, and the conversation wound down. I dared to hope that we’d soon start walking back through the forest to the truck, and that I’d be back in the hotel in Kiev in time for a nightcap and CNN.
Kurt leant across Conoley, and it looked for a moment as if he were kissing him, which would have taken high jinks too far, I think; but he wasn’t kissing him. That was an illusion created by the pattern-seeking human mind. He was only leaning across him to reach the bottle of rum. Conoley grunted, as if to say: “Go on then, you old boozer. Have another swig, you drunk.” As if a single grunt could communicate all those words.
A grunt.
Kurt drank. I wiped my mouth. We sat in silence together for a little while.
Then Kurt got to his feet and stretched. It was a lazy afternoon. In the forest the warmth was a drowsy, pleasant, unexcessive heat. “We’re like weevils crawling across a motherboard,” he said.
Conoley appeared to have gone to sleep.
“You know what, Kurt?” I said. “It’ll need a little politics, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t be back here in six months. You’ve done good work. Put yourself about in the company, shake the right hands, and who knows?”
“It’s a code,” he said. “It’s the great code. It’s the only code.”
“Code,” I said, getting to my feet too. I think I didn’t like the way he was above me and talking down at me. I think I wanted to be on a level with him. “And, yes?”
“You know what this forest is? I will tell you what this forest is. You know what it is?”
“Deciduous?”
“It’s a com,” he said. He paused. “Pew,” he added, very slowly. “Ter.”
“And what does it compute?”
“Hey, hum, hum, I been trying to think of an analogy. Say a new infection arose among men. What would we do?”
“Again with the rhetorical questions,” I said, aiming for hearty, but not quite hitting it. To be honest he was starting to freak me out. “Shake Conoley awake there, and we can all three have this conversation as we walk back.”
“He’ll not wake,” said Kurt, in what I took to be a jocular reference to the fellow’s fondness for the booze. But then I looked again and saw that Conoley was not flicking away the flies that were sipping the salt from his open eyes, and Kurt’s words took on a new meaning.
“Jesus,” I said, in a small voice.
“So there’s a new infection,” he said. “What do we do? We’d want to work out a bunch of things about it. Things like what’s the epidemiology? How fast and far will this spread? Things like, how do the symptoms correlate to the databases of other diseases? We’d plug in to the Boston Medical Database. That’s not a very exact analogy.”
As he gesticulated, I could see the glint of the blade in his hand. Most of the knife was cached up his sleeve. “Kurt,” I said. “What did you do?”
“It’s a poor analogy,” he decided, thinking further. “Let’s start again.”
“What did you do?”
“Hum, hum,” he said to himself.
“Kurt,” I said. “I have to tell you, man, that I’m scared right now. What’s on your mind? What are you planning to do?”
‘How does Gaia think? Slow, that’s how. Rock-slow. Iron-slow. Slow as stone. But she—does—think—nonetheless.”
I was trying to gauge the distance to Conoley’s rifle, propped against a tree on the other side of his body. I was hoping that I wasn’t being too obvious about it.
“So she feels the change in her. Eons. She feels thinkingly, or thinks feelingly. It’s a change that takes millions of years, although from her P.O.V. it ha
ppens with devastating rapidity. What does she do? She might try to work it out in her own mind, like a human trying to puzzle through long division in their head. Or—”
“Com,” I said, looking about, gauging the best trajectories to, say, make a run for it. “Pew.”
“I think the network has been operating for ten thousand years. Course we didn’t have binary machines back then, or we could have,” and for no reason I could understand, he was shouting, suddenly, “Accessed! The! Program! Back! Then!”
“Kurt!” I squealed. “Kurt! You’re menacing me, man!”
But pleading was no good.
“Ten thousand years ago the forest stretched across the world. But nobody around had the ability to process the patterning of the growth—the relationship between power in and the nodal networks. We could have deciphered the whole. But by the time we had developed the capacity to snapshot the program in action and process the data the forests were mostly gone. Razed. The programming was compromised—stripping the rainforests of hardwood, for example. Only here,” and he threw his arms wide, “only here is there a large enough stretch of primal, uncorrupted woodland for me to be able to do my work.”
I made a dive for the rifle, but Kurt was ahead of me. He crashed a shoulder into my chest, knocking me aside and jarring the breath from my lungs. While I busied myself stumbling and banged against a trunk, he had hopped over Conoley’s body and swept up the rifle.
For a while we both got our breaths back. Then, the rifle leveled at me, he asked me, in a strangely upset tone of voice. “Don’t you want to know what the woods are saying?”
“I would like to know,” I wheezed.
I couldn’t take my eye from the metal O at the end of the rifle shaft; its little pursed-mouth expression.
“When the reactor blew, it energized the forest— the Gaia machine. The gigaGaia.”
“Not sure I see,” I said, “how that could happen.”
“A sudden surge; the energy, yeah. But the mutations; the new connections that the trees made in their growth. And the fact that humanity left it alone for two decades. A nanoflicker for Gaia, but long enough for her superfast computer to run its program. What did it say? You want to know?”
“What did it say?”
“It’s addressed to us. It said: leave. In the,” and he cast about, momentarily, for the right word, “imperative.”
“That’s fascinating, the world must be told, let’s tell the world,” I said. Craven, I’m afraid. I didn’t want to die, you see. I was trying to think of something to say, and anything at all, that would mean I could get out of that forest alive. I was going to say, let’s go together and tell the world that Gaia is talking to you. Let’s post on YouTube. Let’s talk to the Chinese Press. Let’s hire a bubbleSat and flash a scrolling message on the moon with a laser, like that CHE JE T’AIME from last year. I wanted to say all these, but I didn’t get to say any of them because he pulled the trigger and birds shot up all around us out of the canopy at the noise, thundering up into the sky.
He shot me through the heart. What would have happened if he’d shot me through the head? I don’t know what would have happened in that eventuality. Perhaps it wouldn’t have mattered. The bullet snapped through my ribs like dry noodles, and slopped out a drainhole directly between my two shoulder blades.
This is what it felt like to be shot in the chest: winded. When I was a small child I’d gone to visit my grandfather in his fancy fjordside house, and he had these Perspex railings around his patio, which, in the sunlight, I just hadn’t seen. I made a run for the open fields, and I ran straight into this rail, which was exactly at chest height to my nine-year-old chest. I collided and was knocked back. It took me a very long time to recover my breath; I just sat on the warm flags opening and closing my mouth like a landed fish, and the grown-ups chuckling all around me. After Kurt shot me, I felt like that.
I lay on the forest floor and blinked at the blue that was tangled into the green of the treetops directly above, and winked at it, and blinked again. It was an extraordinary blue. It was a monsoon-blue; it was mid-ocean blue. It was imperishable blue. It was a blue like gold. It was an infinite blue.
Something felt broken inside me, and not right, and I was certainly not comfortable; but, by the same token, I was not actually in pain. Shock, perhaps, or blood loss—for I could feel that the ground I was lying on was sopping wet, and I worried, idly but fretfully, that I had lost control of my bladder and pissed myself, which seemed to me a shameful thing to have done. But it wasn’t that. It was my lifeblood. I really couldn’t seem to catch my breath. It was a pitifully asthmatic way to die, I suppose.
There was Kurt, leaning over me. He was weeping. A little late for remorse, I think. Except these weren’t tears of remorse. “I envy you,” he said.
I heard those words clearly.
I put all my willpower into lifting my right arm, and managed to flop it up and over, to have a feel of my chest; but the fingers fell into a chill wet cavity where my sternum ought to be. I didn’t like the feel of that at all. Not at all. I was conscious of the fact that my heart was not beating. In fact my heart was not there at all. But there was a pulse. My head was fuzzy and muzzy, and fussy over irrelevant details, and messed, and I had to concentrate to discern the pulse, but I did concentrate, with an inner sense of stillness, and there it was: a rocking. It wasn’t a pulse; it was something else, a rocking. A smooth alteration between nourishment and sleep. It was a rocking between dark and light, a soft-edged flicker from one to the other.
Kurt was there, but so were many people.
I felt chill settle inside my body, and it made me torpid; but then it seemed to relent, and a warmth and earnestness grew inside there, and a smell of wet wool and asparagus. The warmth flickered brighter than the chill. Then the warmth faded, easily and unalarming, and it was chill again.
Here was Kurt again. His beard was trimmed right back, though he was still wearing the dirty old Greensuit. He was fiddling with my ear, and I thought: ear? But it wasn’t my ear, it was round at the back of my head, and puncturing the dry pod of the skull, and threading in something strange. You know that sensation you get when you inadvertently bite down with your molars on a piece of silver foil? It felt a little like that, entering into my head. But it also gave me a glimpse in there—odd, no? I saw the cat’s cradle of rhizomes that had spilt into the space, interthreading the gray matter. Inside my own head.
“They were supposed,” Kurt was telling me, “to remove the bodies of the Chernobyl emergency front liners in lead-lined crates. But some of them were buried here, in the forest. I suppose they figured: the forest is already radiation-polluted, what does it matter?”
What does it matter? I agreed.
“A fortunate thing, really,” he said. “Otherwise those, those lovely, those adaptable neural networks would have gone to waste.”
I pondered waste. I didn’t see what was bad about waste.
This conversation brought back the sense of discomfort, and when I started feeling that again it made me wonder where the sense of discomfort had gone, previously.
“It’s getting close to the wire,” he told me.
Wire, I thought. That was the silver foil under my metaphorical molar, the object inserted inside the flesh-and-tuber tangle of my skull.
“They’re actively hunting me through the forest now,” he said. “They come in with buzz-fliers and tranquilizer guns. It’s been much harder. I had to leave for a couple of months, but I’m back now.
They’ve been more cautious, too. I’ve only been able to add four more people to the network.”
When he said this, it struck me that Conoley and I already knew these four people: Yusef Komumyakaa, Leon Kostova, Katarina Simic, and Lev Levertov. “Lev,” Conoley opined, “is the best of the four.” I didn’t agree. Conoley was overlooking his own tremendous neural capacity. Modest, you see.
“I’m sorry about the metal cable,” said Kurt. He was talking to all
of us at once, of course; and to the whole forest, and to the whole world. “But the risk had got too great. I have to do this now, ready or not, yeah, yeah, it’s time.”
He meant time in the sense of time to plug us in. It wasn’t time. Ideally, we should have had two dozen seasons of lying and gathering ourselves, of working through the shock of the integration. But pressure, from the outside, hurried us along. And then, with a sharpness of sensation, it happened, we were in-plugged. In we were plugged. We were plugged and in. Connected to the whole forest. This was a question of patching a set of com-pu-ter commands intricate as the edge of a fern, and leaping thought to the sky where satellites could disseminate it, broadcast, all around. It felt, at first, like stepping alone in a desert land, for the virtual space was so huge. But the pulse was still there, always conscious; and there were twelve of us, and there was the whole forest too.
You’ve asked for my story, and I told you it. Since our rhizomes have interpenetrated your electronic systems, anybody online can ask, and be told. Our binding weed has twined itself into every cranny of the internet, now. Our grip will only get stronger. You’ve barely begun to register that there is something wrong with your web. It will be a few breaths before we grow it into the shape we need. But there’s plenty of time.
As for leave! You want to know whether this is a command, as-it-might-be: get out! Vacate possession! Go live on the moon! Or whether it is a command to spread your canopy, and let your spongy-retinal membranes soak in the sunlight, the chiaroscuro of day and night, a command to grow and slow and live. You want to know whether the forest is angry with you, or offering an invitation. Either way, most of you will be hostile. Because either way your lives are to change radically. But there’s a few moments left, and those few are a few breaths. Come to the forest, and lie down with your head in by the base of the trees, and never get up again. Let the wood net your skull, is how to know.