Connections - Short Story

“Let our atoms melt together, let our nuclei converge” Aiden Moffat

There are right angles and there are wrong angles and we all know the difference. We learn that stealing is bad, that giving is good and that oil and water don’t mix. This isn’t one of those stories. Just a tale of things at the end of time in all their strangeness. You can decide what kind of a story it is, so long as you remember that you are a part of this world.

And so we begin, in a land devoid of humans.

. . .

She was feeling fuzzy, her myriad connections working slower than normal.

The day warmed the earth and she begrudged it. But her rounds wouldn’t do themselves so she went from sapling to sapling, numbly tending to their needs. If it weren’t for her garden, Serafin didn’t think she could carry on. All she wanted was to lie in the mulch she had created and give in to its slop, its blissful degradation. To become mere molecules in the soup of celestial matter. But to abandon her fledgling trees after everything they had been through... they would never survive. So she pruned and prodded, day in, day out, sharing the remnants of the earth with them. It had become harder recently of course, with the seasons amok, her stream nearly dry and no protection from the elements. And there were the neighbours: a grotesquely straight plantation of soy that stretched out and blanketed the earth in a frenzied growth of lurid green. At first, Serafin had tried speaking. But they were repetitive and impossible to understand in their identical cackles. She gave them a wide berth now.

Exhausted from her duties, she sent a few mycelial tendrils through the earth to a hill. It was where she came to check on her proteges above ground. Although in constant communication through their subterranean network, Serafin liked to see evidence of her work. She could rest easier knowing they were growing strong and in the right direction. If any veered offtrack, she would coax them to remember the sun and how punishing it could be. If one grew faster than the rest, she admonished him with a warning to share, lest the unglenauts came and plucked all his leaves off in summer.

Up she climbed, kissing the few-and-far-between earthworms on each cheek as she passed. As the sun set, two tiny mushrooms sprung at the apex of the hill and she looked out over her copse of saplings shunted to the side by a vast sea of soy.

And my how the saplings had grown! The first buds of spring were starting to unfurl on her more advanced little trees, whilst the late developers were yet to show the first flushes of toddlerdom. One or two were a little crooked; she would have words later. But some had been that way since the cruel loss of their parents. She prayed to the unglenauts to spare the crooked ones and longed for the day when she would be able to converse freely with each of them. They were young and couldn’t yet talk. She was old and there was only so much babybabble an old girl could manage. What Serafin missed most were the long back and forths late into the night with the oldest trees. They would sooth her with stories of the upper world during her lengthy retreats underground.

Taking one last cursory glance across her world, all looked the same. She had learnt to ignore the waving sheaths of monotonous green as they tried to grab her attention. So she started to make her way back down the hill. Except all wasn’t the same. From the corner of her mind she sensed a new object. Something that caught the sun’s last rays and threw them back at her in a prism of pink. It was moving. In a flitting motion, back and forth down one of the rows of soy plants. Birdlike. But she knew all the birds by name and this certainly wasn’t one of them. It shined the way water did. And it moved in a way nothing in her forest ever had. To and fro, to and fro. Serafin was transfixed and grew her mushrooms a little taller to get a better view. 

It was metallic and straight edged with sleek black runners. Warily, she called out, releasing a puff of chemicals into the wind. But it took no notice. Curiosity rising, she retreated from her hilltop vantage point to get a closer look. 

She crept forward, one hyphae at a time, past her thicket of saplings, who called out for her.

“Hush little ones, I’ll be back before the moon rises”.

Serafin could hear it now, a metallic whirring as the thing went to-and-fro, to-and-fro. She tried to push a few fruiting bodies through the parched earth but it was solid. This was uncharted terrain; not since her world stopped had she ventured out this far. It was hard dirt, not a bug in sight and certainly no place for a fungus with its sludge of desiccating fertilisers. But something compelled her forwards and she broke down a few of her own tendrils to provide enough liquid to push through the wasteland. With eyes above ground, she peered through the boulevard of green stems.

The metallic being approached an ailing soy plant and paused as though to assess its state. Then it sprung to action, pruning bedraggled leaves, breaking up the soil and projecting a spray of mist from a protrusion of pipe. Once done, it whooshed over to the next plant. Some apparently needed no attention, others had their stems straightened or their roots aerated.

Serafin looked on admiringly, gardener to gardener, as it tended its crop. It was like her! Less disparate and above ground, but like her nonetheless. Could it be an unglenaut, those spirits of the woods recalled by the tree elders of years gone by? Leaves had whispered that they were there at the birth of the great forest. If so, it could be a kindred being. Her mind drifted off to new beginnings, to a world returned to its primordial self.

With a boldness that surprised her, she called out.

“Hello!”. It continued its ceaseless buzzing, not turning her way. She tried again, louder.

“I see you’re a gardener! I don’t mean to stop your work but–” 

“Stopping irrigation programme. To confirm, say yes”

“Oh yes, if you could”. And the machine abruptly came to a halt.

“I haven’t seen you before, and I’ve been here for a very long time”.

The machine said nothing.

“Of course I try to avoid the plantation so I could have missed you”.

Nothing.

“I saw you tending to the plants. You certainly have a way with them”, she said coyly.

Serafin looked intently at the being, waiting for a response, but found she didn’t quite know where to rest her gaze. It had no discernable centre. Instead, wires connected every which way in a tentacular mass. The letters FAID-O glowed on its metallic body. (She couldn’t know that FAID-O stood for “Fully Autonomous Irrigation Device - Odessa Ltd). There was something vaguely familiar about its form, something unsettling. The more she stared, the more there was to discover and Serafin found that without realising, she had extended 3 hyphal tips to investigate with the best means she had; scent. The machine seemed to be examining her too. It had extended a gyroscopic camera and was roving it around her. Just as her mycelia came close enough for contact, the machine retracted its camera and announced:

“Analysis complete. Insignificant lifeform” and it sped away.

For many growth cycles, she watched the being from afar. The sting of its parting message gave way to fascination. Serafin tracked its patterns and so began a longing to know it more intimately, to connect deeply the way she used to. She wanted to converse with an intelligent being again and create matter in the great dance of symbiosis. As her obsession grew, the saplings lost their meaning. They called out but her mind was elsewhere, sending signals and hoping one might return.

Summer came and the heat was unbearable. Her chitin walls became suffocatingly tight and she thought she might implode. The saplings whined for water which she could not provide and the dust swirled around their abode in ghastly shapes. Lust for the machine boiled into anger. How did it always have water? Why should she and her trees reach this brittle point whilst the soy stood tall, mocking them in waves of shocking green? Her rage spilled over and she bowled through the undergrowth as fast as her parched frame could manage, to demand what was rightfully theirs.

But when she got there, the machine was still. No lights, no wurring. Nothing to suggest it ever was a being at all. Time took a strange turn; it had happened once before.

She reaches out a mycelial tendril. The distance between them feels insurmountable and it takes several growth cycles before contact is made. It’s a cold contact, as metallic as she is soft. But the feel of an intelligent network entangling in her touch is pure ecstasy. Every cell tingles in electric symphony. Serafin wants more contact, more bonds, so she winds fronds of hyphae round FAID-O’s sleek black wires until mushroom and machine merge into a spiral of chaos. But as we know, some things don’t mix. Organic network and inorganic matter are a case in point. Things go awry. (She can’t tell yet, but this is  going terribly, terribly wrong). The shock waves, the sparks, all of it overwhelming and alarming and blissfully painful.

But wait, memories are imposing themselves. (Isn’t that what happens before death?) No time to consider her present predicament when the past is calling. Back on her hill, sobbing, she looks out over a wasteland where her once glorious forest stood. A fallen army of skeleton trees. Her home, before it fell. Serafin watches, she is falling apart, decomposing. Not in a good way. And yet she doesn’t die, life cruelly clings on, separating her from her community.

Further back, her first connection: a hemlock twice her age. She was shy so waited for him to make the first move. Usually it was fungus first. But not with him. Root to hyphal tip, they bonded in a spiral embrace and she never wanted to let go.

And back, back to when she was just a spore riding on the backs of earthworms with her siblings. Waiting for their chance to prove themselves, to be a part of something big, the thing connecting all living things. Waiting to be the bridge between worlds. Waiting to grow up (it’s a story as old as time, no?).

All the way back beyond herself, beyond the body she knows, to her parents. Who could even count how long they had been there?

But now that day, the one she tries so hard not to think about, is becoming impossible to ignore. It settles into the crevices of her disparate body and she can set it aside no longer. The letters FAID-O. Rearranging themselves, coming back to FAID-O. FAID-O. She understands with aching clarity that the machine was not who she thought it was as flashes of yellow monsters, each christened FAID-O tear down her trees, her nirvana, her family. They crash through a forest as old as time; brutal cracks of splintering wood blast out. She feels the tearing away, the roots flung naked into the air, the chasm of a civilization felled.

We rush with Serafina back to the present. It might be too late. There was an odour of mushrooms frying. Tendrils were flailing; some seemed to be falling apart. From a distance, she heard the call of youth - little trees that needed her, and she tried to gather her massive body back together. But the electric bliss from her contact with FAID-O returned. They were too entangled; she couldn’t extricate herself. But she must get back; must feed the future. Willing herself back to the thicket of trees, she dragged the machine’s static frame with her. Every cell was screaming but she kept going; they were within reach now. Only a growth cycle away. Relief flooded her body as she made contact with her eldest sapling. Having given all she could give, to this land, to the forest, Serafin let go, knowing her body would provide the sustenance the saplings needed. In an explosion of mycelia, her body dispersed, carried by the wind to the survivors of another world.