by SJ Fleming
It wasn’t a particularly complex path to the line, though. Just one or two schluckgrubs that weren’t fast enough to escape being crushed. A shudder of disgust went through Willow each time there was a pop underfoot. It took a lot of willpower to not think about what it looked like.
She grabbed the vine and gave it a solid tug, just to make sure it was still in place and that the rope hadn’t snapped or been cut. Thousands of tiny hairs on the vine gripped into her skin and held her stable. She pulled herself up slowly, bit by bit, the vine responding to her movements by letting go and gripping whenever she did the same. Inch by inch, foot by foot, she crawled up the vine into the light.
The sun was already setting by the time she finally clambered onto Yggdrasil’s branches. It had been hours. Hours since she first went down. She didn’t know what took so long, it certainly hadn’t felt that long. It must have been the wandering in the dark. That could eat up a lot of time, particularly if one was unfamiliar with the area.
She rushed through the paths and winding natural tunnels of the tree, around her Stamen’s living quarters - dozens upon dozens of small hollows, some natural, some carved. The tree itself was practically a mountain range. The Stamen itself was in a much larger hollow in the tree. Almost trough-shaped. A stream ran down the central area, carving through the wood and the hollows started at about fifty paces from it. Some were placed on a second level, with a footpath connecting them to the rest, and stairs jutting out every so often to allow easier access.
Dozens of people walked around, tending to the stream and gathering water, or working at one of the dozens of little gardens that dotted the area. She rushed down one set of stairs, making her way to the very edge of the stream before its sudden plunge into the Undergrowth. A fence had been grown, a hedging to protect the young ones from falling over. At the edge, there was a structure, built out of adobe and thatching. At least, part of it was. It leaned against the wall of the tree, with a much larger hollow inside, but the outside was very clearly unnatural. Good for marking it out as unique in the Stamen.
She knocked on the door. A few moments passed before Woundmender Oak came and greeted her. He was an old man, nearing ninety years old, but still had the energy of someone forty years younger. He practically jogged through the building, telling Willow to just put the fungus down on a table. Oak examined the fungus, and smiled.
“Yes, good! This is more than I could have asked for! Thank you, thank you! Ah, now, payment, yes, I believe I said I would repay you in some way. How can I help you, now?”
“I need a new obsidian knife and adze. Also, if you could get me some rachi, I’d appreciate it.”
“I can do all of that. When do you need them by?”
Willow shrugged. “When you can get them, I guess. I need the knife very soon, but everything else is...whenever.”
Woundmender Oak nodded. “Very well, I shall see what I can do. Where did your knife go? I hope the journey wasn’t dangerous enough to warrant its use.”
Willow shuffled a bit, and sighed. Might as well be honest with him, maybe Woundmender Oak could elucidate what the hell had happened. It was medical in nature, after all.
“Mind if I sit down? It’s a bit of a long story.”
“I’ll make tea!” Woundmender Oak gathered the fungus and put it into a pile, down by the entrance into the Woundmender hollow proper. He rushed to the kitchen. “Keep talking, I’m listening!”
“Okay ... so, when I went down into Undergrowth, I found a cave, and there was a ... hand. The hand was attached to a person, I found a person made of metal. I accidently cut myself after reaching for my knife, and, well...the metal person stabbed me with a needle, then sewed up the cut…”
Oak frowned, putting a small cup of tea down on the table for her. It was light, fruity, and steaming hot. Willow let it sit for a moment to cool before taking a tiny sip. Without asking, Oak grabbed her hand and examined it, tracing his fingers over the cut. His brow furrowed in confusion, and then comprehension.
“You encountered one of the Iron Ones. Were they hostile to you after this? Speak, quickly!”
“No, no,” Willow said. “They just told me to go.”
“Good. Those damned things should have never been made, let alone loosed upon this world!” Anger carried in his voice, venom reserved only for things truly, utterly hated. “I recommend you report this to the Warguide. Relics of the Polluted Age are things we should never preserve.”
“If...you don’t mind me asking,” Willow was cautious, not sure what would set him off on a tirade, “What...is an Iron One?”
“Iron Ones are...fake people. The Polluted Ones created them because they had become too lazy to work, and too unrestrained in their desires. Bit by bit, they improved the intelligence, until they mimicked the divine seed of consciousness so closely that no one could tell them apart. They’re false replicas of intelligence, designed to serve those who brought ruin to this world.”
Willow sipped her tea slowly. Suzy sure didn’t seem like a false intelligence, or a mimic. Everything she did was, ultimately, the products of an artificial being, that was true. But Willow couldn’t shake off the feeling that under the metal, there was something there. Something divine, and alive, even if the rest of her wasn’t. Maybe the Iron Ones were intended to give off that effect. Maybe they really all were just copies of actual, true, intelligence. But...what was the difference, she thought, between a true intelligence, and a copy good enough to fool one? Was there a difference?
She kept these thoughts to herself.
Oak sighed, and nodded. “I apologize for that rant. You are safe, and the Iron One is probably long gone, finding some other cave to inhabit. Now, I must get to preparing the fungus you brought for drying.”
“Yes, of course,” Willow said, finishing the small cup of tea. She stood up, and made a short bow towards Oak. “Thank you for your hospitality.”
She left the Woundmender Hollow and made her way to her own home. It was near the opposite end of the Stamen, far up the river. She walked through, past the many gardens and small orchards, each of the fruit-trees loving crafted by the Treesingers to have the most produce in a small area. There was a small grove, just six fig trees altogether, outside of her hollow. She picked a few fruits before going inside.
Her hollow wasn’t anything particularly grand. One single room, with a bed and a low table. There was a chest under that table, and another at the end of the bed. She knelt down at the table. Using the chest as a table was, at best, awkward, and at worst, damaging to the chest. They were kept together with clever carving and sap, something that did the job but didn’t exactly lend itself to strength.
The lumifruit shrub that grew in the corner lit up as she shuffled about, bathing the entire hollow in gentle light and illuminating all the curves and contours.
She let out a long sigh, thinking over the events of the day. Soon enough, she’d need to go down again. Maybe Suzy would be down there still, like she said. Or maybe Woundmender Oak was right, and she would go and find some other place to sulk.
Willow put herself, or at least tried to put herself, in Suzy’s place. Waking up to strangers near three hundred years after going to sleep. It sounded almost like a story she was told as a kid, about someone who went to sleep and woke up so long ago afterwards his wife had died and his house had rotted away. She could barely imagine it back then, and now she wasn’t much better off, since a real-life example had appeared.
She lay down on the bed, nestling in with the thick sheets of woven fabric. She stared up at her ceiling until the lumifruit faded and the room became pitch black. The minutes passed by silently, the constant flowing of the nearby river the only sound as everyone in the Stamen settled into the evening.
Willow didn’t sleep that night.
Chapter two
The next time Willow descended to the Undergrowth, she took extra precaution. Her knife had an improved sheath; her previous fumbling had convinced her to get an awl a
nd make a strap to keep it in place. She didn’t feel like cutting herself again, after all. Now, a piece of cloth with a wood pin kept the handle upright in the bag.
She was told to gather some mushrooms to eat, some once-farmed truffle that existed all the way down here. How it ended up down here she really didn’t know, and it didn’t feel too relevant to her interests to ask. That was an issue for the Treesingers to figure out, not her.
And, with any luck, she’d give Suzy a visit.
Willow found herself drawn to that Iron One. Even with Woundmender Oak’s warnings against them, even when she asked others and heard they were war-machines and thinking rocks, she was drawn to Suzy. In fact, it seemed as though every detail given about the Iron Ones, every vague whisper from the Stamen after she told her story around the campfire only made her more curious. She wanted to find Suzy. Talk to her. Find out what life was like before Yggdrasil, and how the statue was able to walk and talk and think.
She went down the path from before, marking her way with the internal juices of a lumifruit to prevent the unfortunate situation of having to blindly wander around the Undergrowth with big worms crawling everywhere. It wouldn’t last forever, sure, but it was better than nothing. Bit by bit, she made her way down the path, until she reached a cave. It was
yet wasn’t
the same cave she had found Suzy in. It was, as it was in the same location, and wasn’t, as Suzy had been rather busy.
Suzy had dug a wide, shallow channel that drained the water away from the cave, off to some other hole. There was even a makeshift door, made out of...something. Willow couldn’t place the material, it was some sort of shiny fabric she had never seen before. Outside of the cave, there was a big pile of leaves and other cleared debris. Suzy had been hard at work, to say the least. But to what end?
Suzy emerged from the cave, and waved Willow over.
“Hello! I am sorry about the mess, but you caught me rather off-guard. I would have cleaned up more if I had known you were coming.”
Willow bowed slightly. “You shouldn’t treat me like a guest, Suzy, I’m just passing by on my route.”
“I see! Well, I believe then that it would be useful for this…” she looked around for a moment, trying to find the proper word. “...alcove...to be a sort of port in the storm for you, then. I’ve heard a lot of strange sounds as of late, thus I feel it is imperative that you have some form of shelter during your more prolonged stays.”
Willow smiled gently, and went to sit down by the small river. Suzy reacted quickly, rushing over and grabbing her wrist, yanking Willow back up with strength that Suzy’s small frame had hidden. She stood a full head-and-a-half shorter than Willow, and yet Suzy was able to pull her around with no issue whatsoever.
“No, no! Do not sit on the floor, it is rather dirty. I apologize for not having a seating arrangement set up, but if you are patient with me, I am certain I can find something! Please, be patient!” She said, about to run off into the dark.
“Suzy, no!” Willow sighed. “It’s fine, it’s...fine. Where I’m from, sitting on a floor’s normal and all that. You don’t need to do anything for me, really.”
“That hardly seems sanitary,” Suzy frowned. “If you insist. Can I get you anything?”
Willow shook her head. “No, no, I’m fine. I mean...if...you can find some dry wood or something, I think I’ll take your suggestion and take a short break here.”
“Wonderful, I shall go looking!” She rushed off to find whatever she could. Willow sat herself down, and rummaged through her pack. She pulled out the rations for today, checking for the charcoal ‘1’ that she had sketched on to the cloth. Inside, in a dozen packages of leaves wrapped up and bound with twine, an assortment of different foods lay before her. Flatbread, avocado, dried fruit, nuts, all sorts of things.
Suzy came back, carrying a big pile of branches in her arms. She put them down on the ground by Willow.
“There!” She declared, putting her hands on her hips proudly. “Anything else?”
“No, I should be fine. Please, sit down, make yourself comfortable.”
There was an uncomfortable silence as Suzy tried to resolve some sort of internal conflict. Willow could see the gears turning in her head (the expression becoming perhaps more literal than she intended), and eventually, Suzy sat down across from Willow.
Willow pulled out a small scrap of charcloth, and just as she got her firebow out, Suzy stopped her.
“Here, let me!” She declared, grabbing the charcloth and setting up a small fire. She grabbed her index finger by the middle, and with a movement wholly unnatural, bent the first knuckle all the way back. Sparks jumped between two small prongs where bone should have been, and she thrust her hand into the pile of wood and charcloth. A few seconds passed, and an ember grew and spread, catching on the wood.
Suzy put her finger back right, seemingly with no problem or pain. A small tinge of dread painted over Willow’s previous contentment, some feeling of whatever she just observed being utterly wrong. Nothing should be able to move like that, nothing should be able to…to do that. Breaking one’s finger without pain, summoning fire so easily…it was tantamount to magic. At the very least, it gave her a deep feeling of unease.
The orange light danced across Suzy’s silver and white face, illuminated her eyes, brought out every tiny little detail. Bit by bit, the unease subsided. It didn’t vanish, but it subsided and no longer became the forefront of all her thoughts. Willow found herself staring at the work of art, the incredible detailing, down to even the replication of pores on the nose and freckles across the cheeks. Three hundred years ago, before the rust, mold, and the general aging of materials set in, she must have looked even more beautiful.
“So…” Suzy broke the silence. “What...are you?”
“Huh?”
“You do not look like any person I have seen before. Genetic modification was not unusual during my ti-” she stopped herself, and tried to find any wording that made her seem less like a relic of a bygone era. “Before I went into sleep mode. But I have never seen a symbiotic relationship like you seem to have with the plants living within you.”
“I... I’m a Gaian. We all have them.”
“I see. Are there any humans around? They look very similar to you, but their skin is not...green.”
Willow cocked her head. “Gaians are humans though. I was always told we were the same thing. Do you mean the Polluted Ones? There aren’t any of them left, as far as I know. Maybe outside of Yggdrasil.”
Suzy sighed. “So, Gaians are the only remaining humans left? That is...unfortunate…”
Once Suzy realized what she had said, a flurry of flustered half-words poured from her mouth, occasionally with an apology spliced between syllables, before finally collecting herself enough to say what she meant.
“I, I mean...it is unfortunate that whatever happened has...made it unlikely that I will find my family again. I had some hope that they were out there, and that if I could fix everything up and get some sort of normal back. I suppose now that is...highly unlikely, to say the least. Three-hundred years is a long time, yes, but I knew many people who had lived into their two-hundreds before I had gone into sleep mode.”
Willow sighed. She offered Suzy a piece of bread, thinking that at the very least she could share a meal with her and make everything just a little bit better, but Suzy pushed Willow’s hand away.
“I do not eat.”
“You don’t eat bread?” Willow asked.
“I do not
Suzy repeated. The concept of something alive simply...not eating at all was something that Willow took a moment to grasp. Even the plants ate, in a roundabout way, so how could Suzy simply...not? Her brow furrowed as she tried to figure it out without asking. Asking would seem rude, at the very least.
“So…” Suzy changed the topic with all the subtlety of a charging Radmutt. “What is...Yggdrasil?”
“It’s the tree we’re in. Really big, g
oes up a few kilometers and stretches out for dozens on each side. It’s...it’s home. I don’t think I’ve ever stepped outside its branches.”
“Kilometers?”
Suzy exclaimed, her crackling and glitch-filled voice doing nothing to hide her incredulity. “Have you ever been to the top?” Suzy pulled her knees to her chest.
“No, I haven’t. Air’s too thin for me, I get winded pretty easily when I get about halfway there. Besides, my job’s in the Undergrowth, I don’t have any reason to go up there.”
“It’s that tall? Reminds me of the skyscrapers…” a smile tugged at Suzy’s lips. Small, barely noticeable, but there. Like she was caught up in a memory. Willow didn’t feel like asking what a skyscraper was. Whatever answer Suzy could give, it probably would go over her head anyways, given it would most likely reference things that Willow had no hope of ever knowing. Suzy continued speaking anyways, the smile on her face growing bit by bit. A sad smile, brought on by nostalgia for those lost.
“My family, lives—lived, in the top of a skyscraper. I was... sold, and they are the ones who decided to put a sapient AI in my chassis. Gave me a consciousness. They did not have a child, just Steven and Richard and me. I guess that’s why they made me thinking. I even got a room, bed and everything, even if I did not need it. When they did not have chores to do, I would just sit and stare out at the clouds.”
Despite having no tears, she wiped her eyes. Some sort of natural reaction, Willow figured, something that felt right to do, even if it didn’t make sense.
“That…” Willow sighed. “I’m sorry, Suzy. They sound like lovely people.”
“They were. I... suppose that I should stop now. You most likely did not come down here to hear my tale of woe.”
Willow moved more wood on to the fire, stoking it slightly.
“I don’t mind, it’s...if it helps you, I’ll listen. If there’s something I can do to help you a bit down here, let me know.”