The Errant Tree

The Train

Do not suppose that, as Dylan raced across the English farmscape on a high-speed rail, past oceans of modified crops and hulking condensation tents, she felt she had escaped her predicament; rather, though her body was moving at three-hundred kilometers per hour, her worries seemed to move faster, waiting for her around each bend just when she thought she might have outpaced them. In fact, they multiplied by the hour, for as the concept of an audition in Norway became more real, it also felt to her more absurd, until, as the train crossed the English Channel, Dylan wondered what had possessed her to even humor the idea of this farcical excursion, let alone embark upon it. The impetuousness of it all was a testament to her desperation.

But when have you heard a good story, Oskar, about the time everything went to plan? That no risks were taken? That the status quo was was maintained? Of course, riskiness can also lead to disaster; fortune and death lie at opposite ends of the same path, and we tread it without map or compass. So ventured our protagonist blindly into events that we can now plainly see, and for that simple act of braving each step, we must laud her as a hero. But I can tell you, Oskar, that her courage might have failed had she known into what fraught waters she sailed, for leviathans grappled with each other beneath those churning waves, waging a war invisibly in the depths, which would eventually rise to the surface.

Yes, I understand the irony of invoking figurative sea monsters whilst occupying the gizzard of a literal one. So let me, then, illuminate my metaphor.

The conflict is unique, in that it is the first time human organizations have fought directly against an inhuman intelligence as opposed to its effects. It's true that the Information Age might be concisely defined as the struggle of laymen against seductively useful but largely exploitative algorithms, but it was, sociologically speaking, just another facet of an ongoing class war, all driven by your run-of-the-mill hoarders of capital and political power, remarkable only for the unprecedented speed and scale of its battles. Globalization may have created a paradigm shift, but the birth of the Arbormind, Oskar, created an entirely new dimension.

One in which mankind is no longer king.

Authority abhors authority. In that way, power is like a magnetic force, attempting always to banish that which exceeds itself and draw closer that which is inferior. Luna, having been made newly habitable, was an empty space—a power vacuum waiting to be filled—and the organization that stepped into it was the Lunar Guard. With little or no jurisdiction over the colonies, which were managed by their founding nations, the Lunar Guard's only purview was the Moon's fledgling wilds: the vast continents new-grown with mosses and lichens, separated by nascent freshwater oceans, and freshly blanketed with a breathable atmosphere. At first, the only threats it faced were small, inter-colony smuggling rings and the occasional band of pirates. The young ventured out to explore the barren continents, and the enterprising set out to establish their own unchartered colonies. The impact of these transgressions on the common good were minimal, but nonetheless the Lunar Guard crushed them with zeal, jealously exercising what little power it had. With its only oversight a embattled international committee stationed on another planet, the Lunar Guard functioned more like a paramilitary than a sanctioned peacekeeping force, operating largely by instinct and at the direction of commanders whose ranks were more often won by ambition rather than service. The organization gained a fearful reputation which, as I'm sure you'll agree, it still maintains to this day, and which it was happy to have, for ruthlessness is accepted and even encouraged so long as the majority perceives it as beneficial and its overseers perceive it as effective. (Even our little encounter with them just now, which was of course seen all over Earth through Hektor's Errant-Eye, will be considered by them a catastrophic public relations failure.) And so you might not be surprised to learn, Oskar, how badly the Lunar Guard's leadership reacted to its first major public failure with the tragic massacre of the Aagaard Cult.

Do you know the name Hallbjorn Aagaard? Once, it echoed between worlds, the name of the charismatic Norwegian ex-governor who led Oslo's response to the Population Crisis. In his later years, he wielded his family's wealth, influence, and majority control of a massive bioengineering firm to shepherd the Lunar Transformation Project from pipe dream to reality. To many, even though the terraformation of Luna had been a global effort, Hallbjorn Aagaard was the face of it—the new Man in the Moon, if you will. But he was much more than a face. Old in years, Hallbjorn was anything but in form and spirit; he took very well to juvenescence therapy, retaining a youthful appearance well into his hundreds and accruing wisdom and friends all the while, until one day he withdrew into his floating fjord estate, all but disappearing from the public eye. His sudden reclusion was the subject of some speculation, but most people agreed he had simply had his fill of the spotlight, wishing to live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet. And that became the common wisdom... until he was discovered leading a death cult on Herodotus Isle, far to the west of here. I won't go into details, Oskar, for the story is not mine to tell, and there are plenty of other sources on the topic, but suffice to say the cult had been engaging in unsanctioned bioengineering practices, mixing and corrupting genomes into abominable monsters that they then set loose on the island and hunted, often dying grotesquely in the effort. What the Lunar Guard found was more or less a colony of these monster-hunters living in tree houses and reveling in the retellings of their own exploits. The society had existed for so long under the noses of the Lunar Guard that there were some who had lived their entire lives within its grasp, born and raised on its doctrine of blood and glory.

I needn't tell you that heads rolled. Hard-nosed higher-ups were replaced with ruthless higher-ups. The Lunar Guard redoubled its efforts, desperate to recover its reputation. And that is why, nearly fifty years later, when reports of strange creatures and mysterious structures appearing out of nowhere on our beloved Haemus Isle began to circulate, the Guard's embarrassed leadership recognized echoes of the past and leapt to nip the problem in the bud. But as you know, Oskar, that task was not so easy as it had been on Herodotus Isle. There was no leader to arrest. No genetic lab to dismantle. There was only the forest itself. And it knew how to put up a fight. Patrols were driven back. Heavy machinery was disabled or destroyed. Engineered diseases didn't take. Every attempt to clear the island of these troublesome anomalies failed. Can you imagine the Guard's consternation when, after only the first few bombs had dropped, swarms of birds began rising into the air to intercept the rest and carry them gently beneath the forest canopy, where they failed to explode? The leadership was confounded.

Earth's best scientists conjectured that the Lunar Anomaly was merely a side-effect of the hyper-evolutionary processes used in the terraformation process—a statistically improbable glitch in an otherwise fully-functioning cyber-biome. But the Lunar Guard was not content to dismiss the Lunar Anomaly as a harmless curiosity. To them, it was nothing less than hard proof of their ineptitude. Coveted jobs were at stake. Budgets would be slashed. History would name names. The Lunar Anomaly could not be allowed to stand.

And so, tactics changed. When one cannot pull out a weed by force, one must instead dig out its roots. If the Lunar Anomaly wasn't just a glitch, the logic went, if one or more persons were found to be legally responsible for its existence, then the blame could be justly shifted. In the meantime, the Anomaly was attracting the adventurous and foolhardy from two worlds; people holidaying in the Apennines International Park began to venture across the Sea of Serenity, never to return, which got the Lunar Park Service involved. Pressure mounted. And so the Lunar Guard and its Earthly counterpart, the Lunar Council, kept digging, and digging, and digging, until they could go no further.

Can you guess, Oskar, where they ended up?