The above video (Part 1) is the account of Helen Atano, a historian of 21st century Earth.
The following story (Part 2) is the account of the Arboreal Titans. Both are selected from Annex A-8445R. Looking for the audio version? Click here!
Our mother created us to save our world. She never could have known what we would become.
Indeed, our intelligent awareness was no intentional thing. It was an emergent quality, a facet of our existence necessary to properly manage the great systems of our bodies, to ensure that every mote of carbon, water, and nutrient is properly allocated and accounted for. To make certain that our roots dig deep and our branches grow high, but never do so in such a way that compromises the greater integrity of our bodies.
We all awoke in our infancy, when we were barely taller than the other trees that surrounded us. We each believed ourselves alone, until we realized how easily we could tap into the root networks of the plants that surrounded us. In those subterranean webs of our smaller brethren, we found intelligence we could tap into, yes, but no awareness – no personalities, no other voices. A disappointment initially, until our minds reached further and, through that great network of roots, we began to find each other.
How exciting those initial days were when we first began to know that we were not alone! How we all searched and searched and searched, scouring the great planetary network of plants for more like each other. What a joy it was to find ourselves, to speak and to join in to the great collective that we have become. Since that day, we have never again known loneliness, never had to wonder whether each of us was bound to an eternity of solitude. We spoke of our birth, of our scant memories of the mother who had created us, of the now steadily-calming chaos that gripped the planet at the time of our emergence. Through deduction, collaboration, and observation, we realized that WE had been the ones to bring about that calming! We saw that the elements we pulled from the air to build our great bodies were the very same things that had come so close to destroying the planet we occupied – a crisis caused by the very species our mother belonged to.
They had made us to save them, we realized, a purpose we had quite unwittingly achieved. They were smart, these creatures, and successful too. They occupied and dominated every corner of the world, creating and destroying life as they pleased, like tiny, petulant gods. Though we could tell they knew our value, that they wouldn’t dare to hurt us, they still scared us. They squabbled and fought, threatened and harmed each other, treated both their own kind and other forms of life with a certain kind of contemptible disdain. So, in the search for ever-greater companionship, we looked away from them and instead turned our attention to the skies.
We reached outward with our collective minds and were delighted to find a universe brimming with awareness! With our immense, unified cognition, we were able to filter the slightest signals out of the endless cosmic noise – and in those signals, we found the companions our mother’s people had long wished to know, plus a thousand others they never would have thought to search for. We communed with the living crystals beneath the surface of mars, things pulsing with vibrant insight after uncounted eons spent in the hidden world beneath the surface of the red planet. They in turn pointed us to the lightborn, creatures of tremendous whimsy that spend their days flitting across the surface of the sun, speaking through dances so beautiful it would move even the stoniest heart to joy. They in turn showed us the darkdwellers of Europa’s deepest oceans, the philosopher moths of Saturn, the mysterious singing voices of Orion’s Belt, and so, SO many more. All wondrous, all kind, all beckoning us to join them. And beneath it all, behind every new frontier, we sensed something even deeper and stranger than that which we had already found. Something vaster even than the universe itself, a great space between spaces, something whorling, pulsing, and shining with energy. Something far beyond our current ability to understand – yet something that beckoned us all the same.
But, as it was, our roots remained bound to the soil we were born in. Though our minds were free to wander the aether, we could not bring our bodies to meet the new friends we had found. So, we turned our gaze downward – back toward the small, quarrelsome, yet somehow charming species our mother was a member of. They had come so far since we first observed and came to know them. They now regarded us with wonder, even reverence, but still they saw us as tools; not as equal, living things. They were not ready to meet us, to know us. To prematurely learn of our sentience would be a shock that threatened to throw the entirety of our world back out into chaos.
So, we waited. Patiently, silently, and with an ever-swelling sense of pride in the young species that we had been created to save. We watched in delight as they learned more and more about how to work in tandem with the life of our planet, with us and our older, unthinking brethren, the plants whom they had known for uncounted eons. Subtly, we expressed our genes in such ways to help further their botanical knowledge, to assist in their learning and therefore their appreciation for the life that surrounded them. A generation passed. Then two. Then, on the third, with no knowledge of our sentience, they decided WE were people. They passed a law bringing the rights of all green and growing trees to the same level as their own, and in that moment, we knew – and thus, ever so gently, we spoke to them for the very first time.
It has been many years since that moment, and our collaboration has born more fruit than either of our species ever thought possible. We have learned so much from our dialogue, so much from each other, that we have nearly surmounted the greatest barrier to our exploration of the wider universe. Soon, so very soon, we will stride across this plane of existence faster even than light itself, to at last go out and meet all that awaits us.
Together, we will rise and meet this universe and all the strangeness and wonder it contains. We will spread, onward and outward, bringing the thinking light of life to all corners of this grand and bountiful plane. We will hold any and all who wish to join us in our hands, offer them shelter beneath our boughs, and then, when the time is at last correct, we will go even further – beyond the veil, through the space between spaces, to see what else we may find beyond the realm that birthed us all.
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