The Crest
Chapter 62: Free Will

Danielle, Karl, and Fernando gathered in her office. Fernando’s dog, Suerte, sat on the floor, observant, ready to play ball with her master. The leaders were in survival mode for so long that a formal meeting seemed awkward.

“We did it. Most of the trees have been out-planted in the hills.” Danielle said.

“Yes, we did. We should be proud, there are over four million trees thriving out in the enclave.” Karl replied.

“Restoring the land too. We pulled it off. My god, I never thought I’d see this day.” Fernando noted.

“But there is something that’s bothering me, and I don’t know how to say it, so I’ll just go ahead and blurt it out. Do you think they manipulated us?” Danielle asked her team.

“Manipulated is a strong word,” Karl noted.

“Controlled us in some way?”

“Perhaps.”

“I never imagined I’d be speaking these words, but maybe the Antisis were right after all. Maybe we were not exercising our own free will as scientists,” Danielle said gloomily.

Karl and Fernando looked at their boss in shock.

“Never in a million years would I have thought I’d hear that from you, Danielle,” Karl said.

“I’m just saying something feels odd.”

“Let’s think this through. Let’s go back to the very beginning. Who created the Shift?” Karl asked.

“Humans, of course.”

“Right, and do you think the trees said to humans, hey humans stop what the hell you’re doing, you’re killing us.”

“They may have tried, but we weren’t listening.”

That’s my point, people exercised their own resolve, but we were certainly influenced by them.”

“Okay, then after the Shift we reacted how?” she asked.

“Well, we started the assisted migration program. That’s when we really got serious.”

“Who started it? I mean how did it evolve?” she asked.

“I get your train of thought. Well, it was a decision of the three executive heads of FORC, essentially us, and of course our benefactor the Permafrost Corporation, and don’t forget the proxy government.”

Danielle pushed back. “Really?” How did we make that decision to collect seed in California.”

Karl was amazed at the transformation of his boss; she’d really gotten out of her science bubble.

“Science informed our decision,” he said.

“Did it?”

“At least I think it did.”

“Don’t you think it odd, that we were magically directed to those rugged, climate adapted trees in Cali? Think about it, there are millions of trees and we found the right ones based on our exquisitely trained scientific minds? What we did was search for a needle in a haystack and we found the fucking needle.”

Fernando interjected, “I’ll play the mature scientist in the room here. We had general locations of drought-resistant trees on a map. We got that information from previous research.”

“Yes, but we were able to pinpoint those trees so quickly, somehow collect the seed — which by the way miraculously, produced a huge seed crop in a massive drought year and, by the way, fortuitously that seed wasn’t eaten by animals. And, to top it off, we escaped the wildfires. It’s too coincidental.”

“You’re right, to a point.”

“What point am I missing?”

“Trees can produce lots of seed when they are dying. It’s called mast seeding, it’s a last-ditch effort to get their genes out into the environment.”

“What about the empaths? Who guided them to FORC, I mean they came from all over the West.”

“A plant hormone from a mycorrhizae network guided them.”

“You answered my question again. And ask yourself this big question, what are these twenty thousand plant empaths currently doing in the enclave?”

“I don’t know, working?”

“Yes working, but working for whom?”

“FORC.”

“Are they? Think about it you two; think about how efficient the nursery is running these days. It’s purring like a well-oiled machine. Certainly, we can attribute that to your great management, Fernando, but look at what all these empaths are doing. They’re serving the trees. I say serving. They do all the manual labor in the nursery, they water, and they walk down the rows and talk to the new seedlings. They’re like worker bees. And the plants respond, they’re growing by leaps.”

“But the empaths also do other things, they grow the food for the enclave, right?” Fernando countered.

“You answered my next question, Fernando? How are they getting such great yields in the gardens?”

“I get your point, they’re servants of the plants, making them happy.”

“I never thought I would hear the words ‘servants of the plants.’”

“Neither did I.”

“I struggle with the idea that plants have some kind of dominion over man,” Karl said.

“What about the murmurings?” Danielle asked.

“Could have been the trees but it could have been our infrasonic broadcasts.”

“And the mycorrhizae experiments in Corvallis and their almost instantaneous communication from tree to tree?”

“Okay.”

“And the audible communications?”

“They learned, but we figured out how they communicated with us humans. We used our brains to understand their communication system.”

“Did we now? I heard them click out Ode to Joy a few days ago. That wasn’t us figuring them out, it was them figuring us out.”

“You have a point there.”

“Stay with me on this thought association exercise, both of you. I heard the seedlings initiate a binaural beat in the greenhouse. It saved my life from an attacker. Where did they learn that?”

Karl and Fernando stood in wonder. They never thought they’d be having this conversation with the Executive Director.

“Karl, you, yourself say you are a self-confessed plant empath. Your research breakthroughs were amazing, but how did you figure it out?”

“I get your point. I’d like to think I had something to do with it. In my mind, I’m a genius, but there may have been some influence from the plants.”

“You are a genius, a rare kind, but when you told me that the ethylene gas wouldn’t kill the plants in the nursery, you were acting on a different intuition.”

“You are correct, technically, the ethylene should have killed the plants too. I acted instinctually; it was a feeling.”

“And what is instinct in a plant-inspired world? How did the plants know that the enemy was in the nursery before they released the ethylene?”

“Not sure. Co-evolution plays a part. Remember the hominids walking past the acacia trees in Africa?”

“And the Morse Code?”

“The plants figured it out.”

“And the communication from DF-152 at Timothy Lake?” Danielle inquired.

“That was too eerie. But yes, your point is well taken,”

“What about this conversation right now? Are we having this discussion on our own accord or is it due to the trees?”

They looked at each other and laughed.

“I’d like to think that we are all together for a reason, whether it be our own free will or not. I don’t know if I could look at myself in the mirror in the morning if I thought I was being — controlled.”

Danielle pulled out a half-full bottle of Jameson and poured three stiff drinks and passed them out. “I don’t need a tree to tell me when I need a drink. And I need one now. To free will,” she toasted.

Karl and Fernando smiled. “To free will,” they said.

Just then, Suerte trotted over and tugged on Fernando’s pant leg, hoping to get outside for a game of ball.

“Or maybe, not too much free will,” Fernando said.

“They all laughed.”