Crossing the Treeline
Project: Designing Science Fiction Scenarios
Project: Designing Science Fiction Scenarios
Of course the first thing that was out of place was the rock, which even with the lopsided throw, missed my head by half an inch. The poor old guy just didn’t know what he’d do with himself now, and, an old man, he was probably just scared. Just the same, a group of us went down there to calm him down. The other residents just stared out the big windows of their ranch-style houses, a few stood in their doorways, waiting. As we proceeded, they would tentatively approach on the overgrown, cracked pavement. We all felt it, the strange emptiness, the wondering, the curiosity.
None of it was quite what I had expected. I guess in my mind I had imagined some fanfare. I don’t know exactly what that would have been, well, maybe I did, but I’m a bit embarrassed to say it. I was expecting feathered plumes and maybe some really out of this world music, a big party of some kind at the end of the rainbow. Instead what showed up, an hour late while we waited at the top of the cul-de-sac was two guys in an ancient but refurbished pickup truck like the ones we saw spreading rubber around here all the time. I guess the world should have been excited, and maybe it was, beyond the treeline, but we wouldn’t have known that that up here.
I must say it was strange to dismantle the camera. I’d become so used to it that I noticed it no more than I noticed the mailboxes on the street, or the birds that often took aim at all the old cars from the telephone wires. Its tripod, half buried under the Nathansons’ ivy in front, had peeled and rusted to a deep red and was covered long dead vines that had themselves been overgrown. Its hollow legs had likely become the homes of tiny animals, and somewhere below the ground, its feet were locked in concrete. But frozen in a yellowing block of Lucite under the shade of one of the street’s many oaks, the camera was absolutely pristine, still clicking at precisely 3 pm every day in unison with hundreds of others throughout the neighborhood, while it stood frozen in time like a photograph. Today, the 21st of September long awaited, it faced one of the other ordinary oaks on the street as it always had, and captured, in its brilliant positioning, every other tree on the street, all the way down to the bottom of the hill.
Today being September 21st though, it was all over. It was a beautiful, sunny day like any other, but I must confess, even being one of the younger residents on the block, I felt pretty horrible too. Like the old man, whom it had taken a half-hour to calm, I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, and instead of throwing rocks at the other people taking down the camera, I buried myself in the moment. When the contractors arrived with the tools and whistled us all over, I was glad to have something to occupy myself and Sarah Robison, who was sitting next to me on the curb, stopped crying. First we dethroned the big block of Lucite, then burned and gummed up a dozen sawblades in cracking it open, spending much of the late afternoon in a haze of tart burning plastic, grief, trepidation and excitement, and hoping the experience would last forever.
I had known the day was coming, but I hadn’t realized how used to the routine I had become. Even if a routine is hell, in time you learn to love the unique and specific cracks in it that the very routine makes possible. You settle in. As much as I’d hated the TV dinners and the re-run drivel and the growing waistline, the time lost day after day in the car going back and forth, I realized that I had indeed fallen in love with it all. I barely knew most of the people on the block but they were my neighbors. I had become too busy considering that this had all been someone else’s life and not my own to bother with neighbors.
When the Lucite cracked, I was the one who caught the camera in my latex gloved hands and I couldn’t believe that I was actually holding it. Having always seen it suspended in Lucite, I was amazed that it weighed something, and only then I realized that I didn’t understand how to use it.
In one moment I was shaking, nervous as all hell and the next ecstatic and the next nervous again and Carlos Orozco kept reassuring me that I had a good grip. When Sarah Robison found the plastic sheeting in the truck and she and her two daughters laid it out carefully on the concrete, I set the camera down, and we did, together, figure out after a few minutes where the little hatch was. As we had been told to expect, there was a little card inside with Gomez Oak Tree Experiment Station 017 written in pen on the side. It was logical, yet strange, how well that writing was preserved.
One of the guys who drove the pickup, who I didn’t recognize; and I realized then why I was surprised by the pickup – they had continued the charade right up to the end – plugged the little card into an old computer from under the driver’s seat, cables dangling from several of its ports, and we all gathered around, waiting forever in anticipation.
“Do they talk to each other?” someone asked.
The driver, who was running the computer waved the question off while the computer took nearly a minute to boot up. It was several more minutes before he found his way around the interface. He had clearly been trained, but the machine had taken its time.
“We won’t be able to say just from this movie,” he finally said. “If they’d waited just ten years we could have figured this out two centuries ago. Oh, the lessons we learn.”
He’d probably been right, but ten years ago, I had been a different person entirely. Ten years isn’t much for a historian, but to a human life it’s a long, winding road with lots of blind corners. It might have made more sense to wait, but I can understand.
I think we had all been expecting the trees to writhe like snakes on the little screen. That didn’t happen, but at one month per second, I did see that the branches of the trees tap one another periodically. Sequentially? How much of it was what I wanted to see, and how much of it was what I actually saw, I suppose the scientists will eventually be able to tell. Was that a rhythm in the touches? Did the touches move like waves up and down the rows of trees in the neighborhood? Or was it just the chaotic dance of the winds of other times that blew them about? At a year per second, the touches, the apparent rhythms of movement were far more teasing and disturbing, and at ten years per second, the rippling of the concrete under where the roots presumably lay showed definite, wave-like patterns.
“My god, they are working together,” someone shouted.
“We can’t go that far yet,” the driver pronounced. “We don’t know if there’s actual intelligence going on; it might be seismic, or something just chemical related to the trees. I’ve shown you all too much already. We really can’t start conjecturing; the scientists are going to analyze these photo sequences from all the cameras. There’s a lot we won’t know for…”
“Years?” someone asked. The voice sounded pained at the prospect. “Centuries?” he continued after the silence. “This is so much bigger than us, so much bigger than whether we keep living in these old houses and driving these old cars, whether they come in and tear down this godforsaken neighborhood.”
The other guy who had been in the pickup, who had stood there silently on the other side of the truck now looked at us, a definite look of compassion on his face. “Thank you,” he said, “for the sacrifices we’ll never know you’ve all made for these experiments. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an agitator, knowing that you may never know whether it was all in vain.”
Looking at the video, I saw that it didn’t have to end on September 21st after all. There might indeed be a need for agitators and antiquated neighborhoods such as this for decades to come. Did I want to stay here? Nobody lived like this anymore; nobody had in probably 300 years. The chemicals, the pollutants, the cars, the dead food and the endless re-runs on the televisions in every house. The isolation was worst of all. Fifty feet from the next house over and you rarely saw the people who lived there. We had become dinosaurs, living here, and how scarily easy it really was to fall back into a way of life with such creature comforts.
We said that we played this old game to agitate the trees, to give them a problem and provoke intelligent response that we could record. But in spreading rubber day to day, we forgot the trees. At some point I at least had forgotten that it was all a simulacrum; it had become real. Was the treeline a boundary to stop the trees from communicating beyond the experiment field, or a boundary for us? Ride across that quarter-mile wide ring of desert, only five miles from here in any given direction, and you were back in the real world. Even though nobody stopped me from crossing it, I would go for months without crossing it, crossing it only when I got to the point of desperation in needing some particular supplies that I couldn’t down at the strip. Presumably, I could waste away here, forever. I knew the trees had as much to do with saving us from global warming two centuries ago as our own rising to the occasion. I knew the issues we face today are just as grave, even if they are natural and not manmade this time. But I made up my mind, standing at the top of that cul-de-sac. September 21st was the day I chose to cross the treeline. It took me a week to pack my things, and I never looked back.
None of it was quite what I had expected. I guess in my mind I had imagined some fanfare. I don’t know exactly what that would have been, well, maybe I did, but I’m a bit embarrassed to say it. I was expecting feathered plumes and maybe some really out of this world music, a big party of some kind at the end of the rainbow. Instead what showed up, an hour late while we waited at the top of the cul-de-sac was two guys in an ancient but refurbished pickup truck like the ones we saw spreading rubber around here all the time. I guess the world should have been excited, and maybe it was, beyond the treeline, but we wouldn’t have known that that up here.
I must say it was strange to dismantle the camera. I’d become so used to it that I noticed it no more than I noticed the mailboxes on the street, or the birds that often took aim at all the old cars from the telephone wires. Its tripod, half buried under the Nathansons’ ivy in front, had peeled and rusted to a deep red and was covered long dead vines that had themselves been overgrown. Its hollow legs had likely become the homes of tiny animals, and somewhere below the ground, its feet were locked in concrete. But frozen in a yellowing block of Lucite under the shade of one of the street’s many oaks, the camera was absolutely pristine, still clicking at precisely 3 pm every day in unison with hundreds of others throughout the neighborhood, while it stood frozen in time like a photograph. Today, the 21st of September long awaited, it faced one of the other ordinary oaks on the street as it always had, and captured, in its brilliant positioning, every other tree on the street, all the way down to the bottom of the hill.
Today being September 21st though, it was all over. It was a beautiful, sunny day like any other, but I must confess, even being one of the younger residents on the block, I felt pretty horrible too. Like the old man, whom it had taken a half-hour to calm, I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, and instead of throwing rocks at the other people taking down the camera, I buried myself in the moment. When the contractors arrived with the tools and whistled us all over, I was glad to have something to occupy myself and Sarah Robison, who was sitting next to me on the curb, stopped crying. First we dethroned the big block of Lucite, then burned and gummed up a dozen sawblades in cracking it open, spending much of the late afternoon in a haze of tart burning plastic, grief, trepidation and excitement, and hoping the experience would last forever.
I had known the day was coming, but I hadn’t realized how used to the routine I had become. Even if a routine is hell, in time you learn to love the unique and specific cracks in it that the very routine makes possible. You settle in. As much as I’d hated the TV dinners and the re-run drivel and the growing waistline, the time lost day after day in the car going back and forth, I realized that I had indeed fallen in love with it all. I barely knew most of the people on the block but they were my neighbors. I had become too busy considering that this had all been someone else’s life and not my own to bother with neighbors.
When the Lucite cracked, I was the one who caught the camera in my latex gloved hands and I couldn’t believe that I was actually holding it. Having always seen it suspended in Lucite, I was amazed that it weighed something, and only then I realized that I didn’t understand how to use it.
In one moment I was shaking, nervous as all hell and the next ecstatic and the next nervous again and Carlos Orozco kept reassuring me that I had a good grip. When Sarah Robison found the plastic sheeting in the truck and she and her two daughters laid it out carefully on the concrete, I set the camera down, and we did, together, figure out after a few minutes where the little hatch was. As we had been told to expect, there was a little card inside with Gomez Oak Tree Experiment Station 017 written in pen on the side. It was logical, yet strange, how well that writing was preserved.
One of the guys who drove the pickup, who I didn’t recognize; and I realized then why I was surprised by the pickup – they had continued the charade right up to the end – plugged the little card into an old computer from under the driver’s seat, cables dangling from several of its ports, and we all gathered around, waiting forever in anticipation.
“Do they talk to each other?” someone asked.
The driver, who was running the computer waved the question off while the computer took nearly a minute to boot up. It was several more minutes before he found his way around the interface. He had clearly been trained, but the machine had taken its time.
“We won’t be able to say just from this movie,” he finally said. “If they’d waited just ten years we could have figured this out two centuries ago. Oh, the lessons we learn.”
He’d probably been right, but ten years ago, I had been a different person entirely. Ten years isn’t much for a historian, but to a human life it’s a long, winding road with lots of blind corners. It might have made more sense to wait, but I can understand.
I think we had all been expecting the trees to writhe like snakes on the little screen. That didn’t happen, but at one month per second, I did see that the branches of the trees tap one another periodically. Sequentially? How much of it was what I wanted to see, and how much of it was what I actually saw, I suppose the scientists will eventually be able to tell. Was that a rhythm in the touches? Did the touches move like waves up and down the rows of trees in the neighborhood? Or was it just the chaotic dance of the winds of other times that blew them about? At a year per second, the touches, the apparent rhythms of movement were far more teasing and disturbing, and at ten years per second, the rippling of the concrete under where the roots presumably lay showed definite, wave-like patterns.
“My god, they are working together,” someone shouted.
“We can’t go that far yet,” the driver pronounced. “We don’t know if there’s actual intelligence going on; it might be seismic, or something just chemical related to the trees. I’ve shown you all too much already. We really can’t start conjecturing; the scientists are going to analyze these photo sequences from all the cameras. There’s a lot we won’t know for…”
“Years?” someone asked. The voice sounded pained at the prospect. “Centuries?” he continued after the silence. “This is so much bigger than us, so much bigger than whether we keep living in these old houses and driving these old cars, whether they come in and tear down this godforsaken neighborhood.”
The other guy who had been in the pickup, who had stood there silently on the other side of the truck now looked at us, a definite look of compassion on his face. “Thank you,” he said, “for the sacrifices we’ll never know you’ve all made for these experiments. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an agitator, knowing that you may never know whether it was all in vain.”
Looking at the video, I saw that it didn’t have to end on September 21st after all. There might indeed be a need for agitators and antiquated neighborhoods such as this for decades to come. Did I want to stay here? Nobody lived like this anymore; nobody had in probably 300 years. The chemicals, the pollutants, the cars, the dead food and the endless re-runs on the televisions in every house. The isolation was worst of all. Fifty feet from the next house over and you rarely saw the people who lived there. We had become dinosaurs, living here, and how scarily easy it really was to fall back into a way of life with such creature comforts.
We said that we played this old game to agitate the trees, to give them a problem and provoke intelligent response that we could record. But in spreading rubber day to day, we forgot the trees. At some point I at least had forgotten that it was all a simulacrum; it had become real. Was the treeline a boundary to stop the trees from communicating beyond the experiment field, or a boundary for us? Ride across that quarter-mile wide ring of desert, only five miles from here in any given direction, and you were back in the real world. Even though nobody stopped me from crossing it, I would go for months without crossing it, crossing it only when I got to the point of desperation in needing some particular supplies that I couldn’t down at the strip. Presumably, I could waste away here, forever. I knew the trees had as much to do with saving us from global warming two centuries ago as our own rising to the occasion. I knew the issues we face today are just as grave, even if they are natural and not manmade this time. But I made up my mind, standing at the top of that cul-de-sac. September 21st was the day I chose to cross the treeline. It took me a week to pack my things, and I never looked back.
Add comment
| Promote (2) |
|
Add to favorites
|
| Create synapse |
|
