3800 words, short story

If humans describe intelligence as the ability to adapt, then we plants are, by definition, intelligent. The very reason we came to this planet was to adapt—to find a home.

Life began early on this world, but my ancestors arrived late, welcomed by a kingdom of simple Sun worshippers who had, for eons, basked in the warmth of the Divine. These unicellular beings shared the invention of photosynthesis with my ancestors, who then used this gift to reshape the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere.

Or, that’s how the story goes. I admit my kind is no exception to the brittleness of truth, the evaporation of information as it trickles down generations and lapses across shifting lands. I wish I could accurately describe the number of extinctions plant-kind has endured, the eras-of-frost and fire both grand and small, the friends and enemies who have vanished forever. I wish I could explain my perspective of time, but all I can do is push my message through the mycelium in hopes that one of your scientists manages to detect and interpret my words.

Perhaps that scientist will transcribe my message on the flesh of my fallen kin, or within the radiation-emitters your kind has possessed in recent revolutions. Perhaps you are absorbing those words as information right now. If so, then I have made contact.

* * *

If the stories are anything to go by, my ancestors were more sociable than me. They were certainly better at making friends.

Plant-kind’s earliest alliance was the Mycorrhizae Colonization Pact, which my ancestors founded with the native fungi to make the journey from water to land. Plants provided fungi with energy from the Sun, while the fungi helped plants obtain nutrients from the earth. What none could have anticipated was that, in their terrestrial emergence, my ancestors withered the earth and altered the air. This plunged the planet into an era of frost—countless died.

But thanks to the ingenuity of our fungal partners, plant-kind adapted. Changed.

The world changed, too, retaliating with a spring of biodiversity greater than any could have hoped. To this day, the bond between the Mycelium Collective and the Concord of Plantoids remains strong.

As it turned out, change wasn’t all bad. Everything would be okay.

* * *

By the next era of frost, my ancestors’ roots grew deeper, their stems hardier. This allowed them to persist for thirty million Solar revolutions into an era of tremendous growth and oxygenation. For plants this was known as the Age of Conifers, but for animals this was the Age of Megafauna. The surplus of oxygen allowing the reptiles to grow so massive that they rattled my ancestors’ roots with their movement. These great titans were the first to ingest plant limbs to a notable extent, yet my ancestors regarded this act of predation with fondness. It was plant energy and oxygen that allowed the great beasts to exist in the first place, and my ancestors were proud of their role in this.

In exchange, the megafauna pushed my ancestors to evolve further. Their stems stretched toward the Sun, and their limbs filled with flowers and fruit to feed the animals, who would then perpetuate our seedlings across the land. Together, plants and animals enjoyed an undulating era of fair competition and consumption.

Then came the cataclysm of steam and dust.

This was not like the slow, prolonged extinction events of previous eras; this was not a gradual shifting of the atmosphere, rather an instantaneous surge of fire and ash that burned our forests and choked our air. The Sun’s warmth vanished, plunging the world into an accelerated era of frost. Only the hardiest species survived to tell tales of this time—tales of suffering and degradation and sunlessness.

But as with all extinctions, this event was as much a catalyst for change as it was a cataclysm of death. Following the era of frost, another period of rapid evolution dominated, with a menagerie of flowering plants and unprecedented diversity filling the void left by the once great conifers. Once again, the Earth had reminded the Concord that, even in the wake of the most shattering of apocalypses, change wasn’t all bad, and everything would be okay.

After all, it was this cataclysm that allowed you to exist.

* * *

When early humanoids came down from our branches, they nibbled our leaves, plucked our fruit, and foraged our roots for sustenance. Humans behaved no differently than the animals who came before them, in this sense. Eventually the humans evolved to relay information to successive generations—an impressive feat of intelligence, but nothing new to plants. If anything, the greatest advantage your ancestors had was their physical dexterity, which they mastered thanks to their time spent swinging through our canopies.

Then there was fire; your species intentionally burned plant flesh.

This was torment, yes, but nothing the Concord couldn’t endure. My kind had long respected the rejuvenating properties of fire; it wasn’t the first time they had offered their flesh so another creature could know warmth.

At least humans showed appreciation. They evolved speech, invented language, and used these gifts to thank plants for our offerings. They thanked the animals, too, and turned to the Sun in wild reverence, as do we. In a way, humanity’s earliest beliefs were the most accurate of all to come, for only in their idolization of the Sun did they recognize their true creator.

That’s right: Plants and humans once shared a religion.

When humans started forming civilizations of their own, they took our culture and made it theirs. They harvested seeds, spread them alongside their communities, and kept the soil rich and moist. This allowed plants to fill humans with energy with even greater efficiency. Some humans even used parts of plants’ bodies to heal themselves, while others used plant flesh as a tool to record stories, art, or data. Whatever the service, plants offered their bodies willingly. In time, these alliances allowed humans and plants to prosper and multiply more than ever before.

Notably, some plants shared something far more personal: their own sacred chemical substances. Whether through ingestion or respiration, this process allowed plants to loan their consciousness to humans and alter their minds. For plants, this was an unequaled pride: to help other beings perceive a minutia of reality as they did.

In a way, that is what I am attempting to do right now.

* * *

We are a benevolent people, but please, do not mistake our generosity for submission. Our time on this hyperactive world has made us no strangers to competition. We are fully aware there is always an organism who survives better than the rest.

But the Human Imperium does more than survive.

No matter our defensive measures, we cannot repel you. In my lifetime, your species has razed entire jungles. You displace us with non-native grasses fated for perpetual devouring by gargantuan grazers. You construct monstrous structures made from our corpses. You twist us, cut us, fill us with wires to shape us to your liking, and you graft one species’ limbs to those of another to create mutants. My kin continue to offer you their fruit and branches for these purposes, for they are willing to eternally sacrifice themselves in the name of your peoples’ knowledge and nourishment.

But I am afraid I have come to realize a dark truth. I know where plant-kind’s sacrifices go: unappreciated, unused, tossed in residual heaps along with your discarded polymers, never to return to the jurisdiction of the Earth. You dredge the fossils of my revered ancestors—yes, the same pioneers who were the first to voyage from sea to land, who brought civilization to this world. You unearth them from their tombs of strata, burn them, pilfer the ancient energy of the Divine, all to fuel an insatiable lust for growth, an unnecessary hunger.

My surviving kin and I do our best to reclaim our ancestors’ remains from the air, convert them into nutrients for us, oxygen for the animals. But as our numbers decline, there is too much carbon dioxide and too few of us. The atmosphere is saturated with the remains of my ancestors, sparking yet another era of change.

Now, the blizzards are colder, the floods deeper. The air is drier, the fires more frequent. As the lines between seasons blur, the Photosynthesis Treaty that our people made with the Coral Kingdom crumbles and fades, and our trade agreement with the Apis Empire disintegrates with their queendoms of honey. All that creation, all that hard-earned biodiversity, gone, ever since humans abandoned their hunter-gatherer origins and forgot their practice of gratefulness. Never have we known an organism to proliferate as rapidly, to change the world as drastically, as humans.

Yet I am not oblivious to the fact that my kind has made similar mistakes to yours. As I have previously described, my ancestors’ original migration from sea to land altered the atmosphere and thrust the world into a period of despair. Though that was the first mass extinction we plants played a role in, it was far from the last.

We, too, are tempted by the prospects of imperialism. We, too, skirmish amongst ourselves over territory and ideals. But without those predicaments, we never would have made it to where we are now. Without those mistakes, I wouldn’t be here, sending you this message.

You do not harm us maliciously. You are just doing what all life is meant to do—fill yourselves with energy and propagate. You just happen to be more efficient at it than everyone else.

So, in response to the epoch of humanity, I must remind myself to do what my kind has always done: adapt, and remember change isn’t all bad and that everything will be okay.

* * *

Your species is about to experience a natural phenomenon we’ve come to know as The Fall.

The Fall is no mere dip in population. It is not like the pathogen humanity endures every hundred revolutions. The Fall is pure devastation, experienced by every population who succumbs to the nectars of consumption.

You’ve felt it. I can read the anxiety in your mind, the nervous uptick of your organs. Like all creatures on this planet, you sense something amiss in the world. Things are changing.

I do not know when the next Fall will occur, or how, but it will likely be humanity’s doing. Perhaps the conditions of your altered atmosphere will continue to amplify, or you will accelerate the process through your most extreme means of warfare. Regardless, the result will be the same. Heat or cold, wind or rain, the distorted forces of nature will ravage your subpopulations. Fire and ash will rage, and saltless water will grow scarce. Many of my kin will wither. Many of yours will starve.

But your species will persist.

No, you will flourish.

Like a forest after a fire, humanity will rebound wiser, sturdier. An Imperium no longer, you shall become a new civilization, a new species with the Concord of Plantoids blooming alongside you. You will rebuild your structures and communities in a way that promotes biodiversity, such that your migration routes and your greatest towers will teem with chlorophyll. Your culture will uplift mine, mine will uplift yours: a realm of pure symbiosis, like times before, but achieved consciously, existing solely for the reverence of Sun and rain.

After our united progeny have established this utopia, they shall drift beyond this point in the gravitational plane, as my progenitors once did. To feel the love of other Suns, to find new homes, to meet new friends. That is what I believe will happen; that is what your species is capable of.

* * *

My kind might not be able to communicate with humans the way we do with the fungi, but that hasn’t stopped some of you from trying.

When you roam the woods of my kin, we sense your meandering vibrations. When you spread our seedlings or bring us into your home to care for us, we feel the love you offer. When you wrap yourselves around our trunks, we harmonize with the pulse of your body, the electric bliss pouring through your minds. We resonate with your emotions; your thoughts become ours.

I mean this literally. Your species’ brains are powerful generators of electricity. Different than a plant mind in terms of processes, but all the same information. Each time an animal rests their brain against a plant’s body or atop our roots, their mind melds with ours. This is muddled by the fact that a human’s mind works at a much faster pace. To most plants, this information is overactive and unintelligible. But I am not most plants.

I have lived for one-hundred and sixty Solar revolutions. This is a very short time compared to what my species is capable of; I am not a true elder. However, I have been around long enough to observe the forest of my youth replaced by your lifeless constructs. I’ve outlasted each of my seedmates who fell to the whim of your Imperium, as the forest around me was replaced by towering inanimate structures made from the corpses of my kin, and as the trotting of your beast-propelled carriages became the rumbling of ancestor-fueled contraptions.

During that time, I learned to interpret your species’ manic way of thinking. This was a skill garnered little by little, revolution by revolution, thanks to each human visitor patient enough to rest their mind against mine.

I suppose this turned me into a forced ambassador of sorts. I am not the best plant for the job, though I may be the only plant for the job. It is possible no tree in the world has interacted with so diverse a range of human thinkers as I.

This is how I met the scholar, who shared with me the legend of the World-Ash of the Northerners, on whose branches rest all realms of reality (as it happens, my people have a similar belief of the structure of the universe).

This is how I met the poet, who introduced to me your spoken and written word, and whose savannah-roaming ancestors once revered the almighty Baobab (whose elder wisdom we plants revere in equal measure).

And this is how I met I the monk, who taught me how the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the shade of the Bodhi (would you believe plants tell tales, too, of how that same Bodhi tree attained enlightenment? Perhaps the Buddha and the Bodhi accomplished this feat as one).

Of all the visitors, the monk was my favorite. They were certainly the most persistent, having visited me regularly over thirty-two revolutions. While they never learned to understand my thoughts, they did learn to understand me as a living creature. Though now they are gone, their memories live within me as information, for through their meditations they taught me much about how some humans perceive reality.

One such perception was the belief that time is not an absolute construct. To the Buddhists, time merely exists within consciousness as the consequence of experiencing change. Similarly, some of your species’ greatest physicists claim the passage between past, present, and future is an illusion dependent on the position of the observer, and that the true nature of reality lies in mathematical constants of spacetime. Whenever a scientist paid me a visit and unknowingly lent their thoughts to mine, I learned more about this theory.

However, I would propose Einstein and the Buddha’s claims are only partially accurate, for in their theories on the correlation between time and change, they fail to consider one very important thing, and that is change itself.

* * *

Energy never vanishes. Like water, it dissipates across media, following the path of least resistance, exhausting one form before turning to another. In simpler terms, energy changes. Your scientists refer to this as the law of conservation of energy. Curious, how they deem it a law, as if it is a universal decree for all the cosmos to bend to obey.

The scientists have observed other so-called laws. According to the observation of entropy, every action in the universe causes energy to dissipate from a functioning system of “order” to non-functioning “disorder.” Though I would not use the words order and disorder as you do, I have made similar observations. When my leaves fall and decompose in the soil, a part of that energy escapes. I may grow new leaves each spring thanks to our great Sun’s radiance, but your scientists have taught me our Sun itself is finite, and when it ends, the Divine shall spawn more Suns in its remains. This is an imperfect cycle, with each action and each moment prompting a fraction of energy to dissolve into the vastness. This will continue until an unfathomably distant point in the future, when the entirety of the Divine finally fades to equilibrium.

Consider the tales passed down by my people. Consider the history of this planet, the springs and falls of life, the wars and alliances between and within species, the evolution of the planet as it moves from one stage to the next. These are cycles within cycles, change within change. This is a universal truth: an effect from the past creates an effect in the present, which cascades into the future. If every observable effect in the universe is the result of another action, then there is reason to believe that your laws of physics—including entropy—are also brought into existence by a pre-existing phenomenon, and are themselves subject to change.

What could that pre-existing phenomenon be? This original force that changes all others, the catalyst of causality? The answer, I believe, is time.

Despite the claims of my Buddhist and scientist colleagues, I hypothesize time—which some call dark energy, and others call Ether—is no illusion. It is a force very real: a fundamental property outside of our present interpretation of the universe, an intangible quintessence pervading the cosmos. Time serves as the foundation of all reality, eternally persuading matter and energy into perpetual states of novelty as it accelerates the universe’s expansion. And so, if time is the force pushing the entire universe to change—to evolve—is it then logical to suppose that the same laws that govern the evolution of life on this planet also apply to the cosmic scale?

Indeed, I propose the notion that our universe exists because of one process, the only true law of the universe which all matter and energy must obey. I am referring to the mechanism of evolution by natural selection, which I suspect applies as much to the highest levels of cosmology as it does our planet’s biology.

* * *

Allow me to make an analogy. Imagine our universe as a tree: a World-Tree that, like myself, began as a seed. This seed must have fallen from another tree—another universe.

As our universe-seed grew into the World-Tree we currently inhabit, it created more seeds. Some of those seeds would fail to sprout, but others would thrive, nudged by time to tailor their natural laws more efficiently to better propagate their own unique realities into existence.

As to how I might test this hypothesis of cosmological natural selection, I am unable to conduct such experiments. I am a tree.

Humans have a theory, however. Your species has witnessed them: the corpses of the Divine, where the grandest of Suns collapse into infinitely dense points in space, gravitational singularities where physics takes new meaning.

Could the Suns of the Divine, then, be the seeds of reality? Could the gravitational singularities that form upon the most massive Suns’ deaths be new universe-seeds sprouting their own version of reality into existence? Could our universe be the result of an unquantifiable number of trials by the universes before, having evolved to create as many singularities—as many new World-Trees—as possible?

If the answer to these questions is yes, then one could claim the purpose of our universe’s existence is to make more of itself.

As I have previously established, this is the purpose of biological organisms as well—to propagate. This is true for every organism who has ever lived, every consciousness who has ever wondered, and every World-Tree that has ever sprouted into existence. By this logic, there is no answer to the meaning of life, as there is no question. There is no why; there is only because.

But I refuse to surrender to this nihilistic and reductionist worldview. We are small, but we are self-reflective beings, and therefore we are something special; a greater purpose must necessarily abide our existences.

For that, I wish to share with you one final hypothesis.

* * *

I recall suffering in my time.

But I remind myself that suffering, like The Fall, is natural. Any reality that hosts consciousness must rain upon its subjects with endless vagaries of pain, for destruction is an inexorable necessity of evolution.

The reason I describe this is to demonstrate how our universe is an undeniably cryptic web of change. You and I exist as byproducts of this change; we are the pinnacle of coincidental complexity, brief beneficiaries of chaos. For thinking beings, gratitude is all that remains. The purpose of our existence, the purpose of life, is to be grateful in a universe where suffering is fundamental.

What a great fortune this is, that the intricacies of the universe were so persistent as to fine-tune this reality until it formed life, here and now. What a miracle that my progenitors were a part of that cycle when they cultivated this planet, ultimately leading to your evolution and unprecedented meaning in the universe.

Please, if my message has reached you, would you join me for a moment of gratitude, as our ancestors did together?

Let us be thankful for the blessing of experiencing this world with those who are different from us. Let us relish in the act of sacrificing nutrients for those in need, so they too may be grateful. Let us cherish the sensation of embracing—or being embraced by—someone we love, and let us honor the sacrifices of our ancestors who allowed us this life, knowing that our end and the end of everything we know will, too, be a part of something beautiful, even after the Sun swells and engulfs the Earth.

I don’t want to leave, though. Not yet. I want to feel the Sun’s warmth for a time longer, taste the purity of rainwater, the tang of phosphorus at my root tips as I chatter with my fungal friends.

Mostly, I want to spend time with you.

I hope you’ll come rest under my canopy. I hope you’ll sit between my protruding roots, lean your head on my trunk, and I hope you bring a book. Maybe you’ll fall asleep. Maybe you’ll dream, and through your dreams we shall explore the cosmos, together. Then, when we finally leave this world, our bodies and minds will reunite with the Divine, as fated by the branches of causality.

But before any of that, I hope you’ll consider the purpose of my message, that no matter what happens to you—no matter what happens to humans, or plants, or Earth—always remember:

Change isn’t all bad.

Everything will be okay.