A Long & Rainy Night

Author’s Note: This story continues the anthology series I’ve come to call The Long Diaspora, as with my other entries this is a standalone piece that can be read with the other works or on it’s own. However, this piece is unique in that it directly follows my earlier story They, The Leukocytes. Many of the characters are new, but that story provides a bit of color as to how the humans we see here got themselves in this situation.

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Enjoy!

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It was always raining in the Night City.

At times just a trickle, a tease of rains to come from the clouds overhead. Other times it would come down in great sheets for hours on end. For weeks at a stretch the streets would fill with thick fog and rains would come and go with the shifting winds. And on the rare occasions when the sky would clear and the stars of a foreign sky shone above, well even then it would still rain as the tremendous towering buildings of the city shed the water with which they were constantly covered.

Most nights were like this though, a soft steady patter against the window panes, towers around reaching up to disappear into the low clouds above containing the whole world to these rain soaked streets. Always raining, always warm, always humid, always night. From where she lay in her bed the city collapsed down to the few hundred feet Lily Koh could see from the street to where the fog bank overhead swallowed the buildings around her. And it glowed, lantern-like. Misty air set ablaze by waves of neon that radiated up from the street in every hue she could see, and many more that she couldn’t. Through the tilted open pane of her window a muggy breeze lazily wafted the clean, heavy musk of an alien world over her face, and carried in the gentle, unceasing hum of the street below. It was stifling.

She tossed in frustration and rolled on top of her partner lying next to her. Sleep wasn’t coming tonight for her, so she might as well get the next best thing out of being in bed before Greer drifted off and left her alone for another unending night. By rights it should have been the best thing about being in bed, by a wide margin. But the city had taken even that old joy. In spite of her frustration, her exhaustion, the old stirrings arose within as she looked down on his gently grinning face, dark hair, smooth skin painted in all the colors of the Night City’s neon. He looked just the way he had when she’d first taken a young girl’s interest in him; smooth and sculpted, amiable and kind, a jackknife smile that still caught her heart off guard.

Looking down on his lively eyes as she began to slowly turn her hips ought to have been one of life’s greatest pleasures. But like so much else, that pleasure had been taken from her, by the people down below, by the city, by the planet itself. The sex, even all these years later, was still fantastic; learned, comfortable in a way she wouldn’t have known how to appreciate when she first met him. She knew though, in the thinking part of her mind that she struggled to lock away, this was sex devoid of original meaning. And so over the years, the rare moments of sleep she was able to grab became the greatest escape in Lily’s life, and her connecting with Greer had become sadly lesser. Still if she focused on the heat that rose up through her hips, on his hands sliding along the soft skin of her back, on his lips whispering on her neck, she could shut out the unending rain, the otherworldly glow, the incessant hum. If she held her mind steady as her blood rose to a rushing climax she could almost, for those fleeting moments, feel human again.

But like all waves, no matter her concentration, it would peak, and then break in a breathless moment. It would inevitably subside. Greer still fell asleep after like a much younger man, like the man he still looked to be, leaving her alone in their tidy apartment for another stifling night. Lily slipped out of bed as his breath settled into the rhythm of a restful sleep she would dream of, if only she could dream. Into crumpled, damp clothes she slid, local fibers that had the decency to breathe despite the rains, and a jacket that stubbornly refused a breath but still accompanied her every day of the past fifteen years, doing what little it could to keep off the night’s deluge.

Out the door, down the hall past others for whom sleep was an abstract concept, to the street and out into the heat and wet and glow and buzz of the Night City. Oak, her citizens dubbed her when the humans had arrived, a cruel joke. Robbing the word of its meaning, proud forms drinking in the sun of a different world, one that no longer lived for all she knew. Lily had known an oak once, or something like it, back aboard the Friend during their years of wandering. It rose up in the biome of the ship, one of the last trees left standing when all else had been cleared away for a population well beyond the intended carrying capacity. The Night City was nothing like an oak, no green, no light, no air.

Instead there were crooked winding streets in all directions filled with fog and bodies and neon. At the center, there was a great old stump, the heart of the old city; it rose up with the other buildings but a hundred times as wide, petrified and black. It wasn’t the stump of an oak though, or any tree. There were no trees here, no plants, no animals, no archaea, no eubacteria, plenty of other species to fill their niches, but the only earthlife here was Lily and the five thousand some odd humans who had accompanied her down to the planet when the ship finally decided to end its journey. Pholoe, great forest, the people called their planet, another joke.

Lily picked a direction at random and walked off, boots splashing lightly in the wet. This was how she spent most of her nights these days, walking the winding narrow streets lined with bustling stalls which opened out to the street beneath the eaves of the buildings above. Some nights she would descend down below the surface through tunnels that laced beneath the street, crossing half the breadth of the city without ever coming up for air, letting her curiosity drive her ever deeper, she still hadn’t found the bottom no matter how deep she’d delved. Other nights she’d climb up into the towers, following sky bridges up and up until she hit the edge of the city and left her looking out at the seething dark forest that awaited outside the city walls.

Each night the city would hum on, incessant as ever, night was after all a fiction here, one shared by the humans to try and satisfy their circadian rhythms. The sun had never risen on the Night City and her people never needed to sleep. So something like a day-night cycle held on in the Human Quarter by a thread, but that was it. If asked before their arrival, most biologists wouldn’t have thought complex life, let alone a society that dwarfed humanity in both age and scale, could arise on a planet like Pholoe, tidally locked as it was to its twin suns. On the day side, the suns beat unendingly on a vast deep ocean, stirring up the storms that stumbled raging around the planet to douse Oak and her sister cities in unending rains, as they lived in the relative shelter of the planet’s one gargantuan continent that wrapped around the ever-dark night side.

This night the rains quickened as Lily walked up a wide concourse that circld around a building. Through the glass above she watched as the curtains of water were lit ablaze by the pulsing, beating lights that ran down the flanks of the buildings overhead. The light would bounce off glass and water in a sinuous dance of a million colors. A kaleidoscope of refracting photons. The people of the Night City wrapped their towers in neon because that was how they had always known how to make light. And in a world of endless night, light was a welcome beauty.

Up the concourse, and across a spanning glass bridge Lily strode purposefully with no purpose. Below her now the street teemed with bustling bodies, whispering courier bots, sliding transit sledges. On she pressed, up elevators, through gates, across bridges, dodging between noisy markets, padding softly through meditation sanctums. Very little was off limits to anyone in the Night City because in a truer sense it was no city at all, but a colony. The streets were busy, but clean, the towers looming, but pleasantly spaced, the people bustling, but ever considerate. That was maybe the most alien thing of all to Lily, who’d only ever known the crowded halls of a starship gone awry. Two billion souls lived in Oak in a density that would’ve made her great great grandparent’s Singapore seem provincial. Two billion and it was always busy, but never crowded. The people of the Night City came and went, rested, worked, traded, and celebrated in a constant pulse that mirrored the dancing lights above.

Past the last stalls of a cloth market Lily pushed and suddenly the building before her opened up under a vast glass paned dome, tall enough to gather little wisps of cloud under its apex. She was several stories up by now as she walked out onto a high esplanade that clung to a curving wall of the dome. Over the rails, down in the stories below rushed a great bend of tiered waterfalls with hot steam pouring up off their iridescent blue waters as they tumbled down between hundreds of pools. The highest of the pools were just a few stories below where she stood, but they cascaded in an intricate array of tiers. Some were barely big enough for two, most were built just perfectly for the people to soak in up to their abdomens in groups of ten to twenty, but others were wide and deep enough you’d need diving equipment to explore their depths. At the bottom of it all the glowing waters rushed over a final edge and plummeted out of sight, down into the deep, roaring depths of the planet. There they would drink of the vigorous heat of Pholoe, the heat that powered these springs, and in a way all the life that was able to make its way in the endless night. Then, sufficiently heated, the waters would come roaring back out the spring at the top to begin the process anew.

This was a gathering place. A place to scratch an old instinctual itch and absorb the life-giving heat of their planet. As impressive as it was from up on the esplanade, this was a minor replica of the great springs that now filled the gargantuan, hollow stump at the center of the city. That was a sacred place, a place of decisions, of contemplation, and when the time was right a place for beginning new generations. The people called themselves dryads, and they valued balance and restraint above all else.

From up high on the esplanade, under the calm, dim lights of the springs, the thousands of dryads that filled the pools looked like nothing so much as sluggish ants. Dark, climbing, crawling slowly on their four legs when they decided to move between pools, but mostly just milling indistinctly in the waters. Up closer though, on the esplanade with Lily, that image disintegrated and they lived up more to their name. In the shadows and shifting lights of the Night City they looked very much like their chosen namesake, dryads, spirits of the forest. Out of the pools they walked up on two legs, forelimbs at their sides, humanlike, but well clear above human height. Or at least the height of the humans who survived their time aboard the Friend. Their skin was a chitinous shell, but covered in soft furs that ranged from black to gray to purple to green. Along their limbs, abdomens, and faces the fur was usually short, like an unimaginably fine moss covering the rocky ridges of their carapaces. Above their dark, lively eyes though that fur grew long into a wild array of forms. Hanging down their backs like thick vines, twisting out in all directions adding feet to their height, arching out in an immaculate imitation of local foliage. Camouflage all of it, designed to help the dryads blend in with the great trees where they would have made their colonies hundreds of millenia past. Now all of it was vestigial, but they kept their camouflage like they kept their need for harmony.

Along the rail a dryad looked over the edge at the pools spilling below. At this distance perception shifted again for Lily, as the being stood a head and half over her and gripped the rail with three jointed claws. Here their insect-like nature reasserted itself. Joints bending in all the wrong ways. Wet, dark eyes revealed their compound structure, looking in all directions at once. Thorax static as they respired statically though openings tucked into their wrong-way joints. Mouth just a dark gash across the bottom of their head that hid an array of nightmarish mouthparts. Lily had lived amongst the dryads long enough even being close with them didn’t bother her, but even she was glad that she couldn’t see the articulated workings of their mouths. There were plenty of humans who even all these years later couldn’t shake the phobias of old-Earth, so they spent their days holed up in the towers of the Human Quarter watching VR sims of more familiar jungles.

It was a shame, not least because their numbers were already scant enough, but because once you got accustomed to the unblinking eyes, their heavy lower abdomens, their gash-like mouths, the dryads were as beautiful as any creature Earth had dreamed up. The short fur of their bodies swirled and mottled over the plates of their exoskeletons, their eyes danced with a flashing intelligence in the neon light of their world, their faces were dotted with constellations of bioluminescence that changed in a dance that matched the lights of the city. The garb they wore was always purely decorative, they had no need for protection from the elements, nor any sense of shame around their bodies. When they chose to adorn themselves it was always in silky cloth intricately dyed, and always for their own aesthetic pleasure alone.
And they sang. They always sang.

The hum of the Night City came not from her machinery, which had long been perfected into an impenetrable silent background of infrastructure that coursed invisibly within the buildings and street, but instead the hum came from her people. The dryads made no sound with their mouths, instead they would hum and beat and trill and whisper with the whole of their bodies. Paired with the dancing colors on their glowing face spots to create an unceasing, ever-evolving thrum of language that Lily understood made room for a great deal more abstract concepts than the twenty six letters she made use of.

Next to her, the dryad gave Lily a slow nod, and hummed “Good evening.”

In her ear an earpiece translated the intent in real time, though by now she would have understood the meaning. She nodded back. This close to the Human Quarter many of the dryads would keep up with human customs like nodding and the concept of “evening”.

“Joining us for a swim tonight?” they buzzed on.

“Not tonight I think,” she’d tried to soak away her concerns many times, but with the city already smothering her, finding a quiet pool to slip into the mists of didn’t seem the cure. “Tonight I need to see the sky.”

“The old instincts still call,” they replied, nodding down towards the pools. “Enjoy yourself, friend.”

Lily bowed slightly back as the dryad stepped silently by. Millennia of genetic programming drove them into the springs, and drove her up to the highest rooftops to escape the hum and the rain and the endless crawling bustle. That programming was what ran the world, not what the dryads claimed to want, not the rains, not the endless night, not the great surrounding artificial intelligences that now watched over the planet and the whole solar system. In the end, it was the thousands of years honing the operating instructions for the planet’s dominant creature that ran the show. The dryads were colony creatures, dependent on their Mother Trees for survival in the carnivorous forest that they rose from. Their individuals had very little say in things, and that was before they built AIs to run things on their behalf.

Dryads began their lives in warm springs much like the ones Lily looked upon now. Hatched from a convergence of reproductive cells released into the water, no parents to speak of, but a colony to look after them. They’d spend the first decade of their arching, long lives in the springs where they were born, growing, learning, maturing. Then fully formed, and in this modern society fully educated as well, they’d head out into the colony to see what it needed from them. As far as Lily understood there was very little want in any of their intentions, they passed along pheromones to one another and somewhere in that ever-changing mix of chemicals some primal part of their mind would understand what they were to do. In the millennia since this system first formed it had adapted, now these instincts mostly told them where to live and what to do of the little work the AIs had left behind for them to do, aside from perpetually driving them back to the springs. It mattered little, the colony needed happy, healthy citizens so that’s what they would be. 

One element of this ancient pheromonal dance remained vital, and its effect controlled the whole planet to this day, that of reproduction. Out of the springs the dryads stepped young and fresh, chitinous fur barely a fuzz growing from their heads, and all asexual. For years, decades, at rare times even centuries, this is how they’d live, just members of the colony. Then on the wind some ineffable signal would blow in and they’d begin to change. Their bodies would rearrange over the years to become male or female for want of better terms, and when they were ready they’d visit the springs at the base of their Mother Trees, or nowadays the springs that filled the old Mother Tree’s stump at the heart of Oak, soak in the waters until all their reproductive cells had been released then head on forever changed but never again to visit those sacred springs. Always a Mother or a Father to children they would never know, until the end of their interminably long lives.

But there was no want in any of it. They would wait until the colony gave them that subconscious signal, and the change would begin. But they would never get the signal unless the colony needed more citizens. In millennia long past, when they were still a species stumbling young, with a hungry forest all around, this meant the change would happen quickly as the colony was constantly trying to recoup numbers. But now, with superintelligence looking down from the skies, woven into the buildings, reaching out across the solar system, all creating a honed balance with scarcity and want only distant memories, the change was rarer and rarer. Well cared for, as all modern dryads were, they’d live for hundreds of years. Without regular loss of citizenry, many would live out their long lives without the change. The Night City was home to billions, as were her sisters spread across the continent. But never more, and never less, not for almost five hundred thousand years.

Looking back over the railing at the pools filled with dark scuttling bodies, Lily thought the comparison to ants startlingly apt. Only one issue, ants that were a fair bit smarter than her or any of the other humans by a considerable margin. Smarter, she considered, possibly wiser too, soaking in the springs, singing, making art, maintaining their colony, enjoying their world for all of their long lives without a care for the future. She shuddered, no, she couldn’t accept that as wisdom, as much as she wished she could.

The lift from the springs up to the highest reaches of the building that towered above her took several minutes to slide up the side of the immense glass mass that pierced the clouds. Along the ride, the pulsing glow of neon bounced between the buildings and the busy streets below. Then she was swallowed by the clouds and the whole world collapsed to just one elevator car slipping through the gauzy glow. Several more minutes passed before she stepped out on the tower’s observation deck. Up this high she was clear of the cloud bank that had brought in the evening’s rain. Here it was only warm swirling mists, and a bank of higher clouds miles overhead. Her heart sank, no sky tonight, no stars. The deck was abandoned. At rare times of cloudlessness dryads with a penchant for amateur astronomy would scurry up to marvel at the stars, but more frequently they had little use for these higher floors beyond that of extra area in their cramped city trapped perpetually as they were in banks of clouds. Still even up here the dancing lights persisted as aurora swayed across the sky, igniting the cloudbank that shut out the stars with illumination to match the city below..

It should have been a beautiful consolation, the beating heart of Pholoe on display painting the clouds red, purple and blue. But Lily craved the stars she knew as a child, crystalline, brilliant and all consuming as she looked out of the great dome of the observation deck aboard the Friend. Those times had been worse, but she could barely remember. Her memories of the ship were mostly colored by the nostalgia of youth. The community that raised her in their converted hangar, the formative friends that had now all grown estranged in adulthood, sneaking off down the ship’s long hallways to skip class and sip stolen mead and talk to the boys from the next hangar over, trips up to the ship’s great observation dome to float in awe of the stars they sailed through.

There was never enough food back then, her mother would be sure to remind her. Water a scarcity, Pholoe made its own mockery of that, rain always dripping off her hem. The ship had been a catastrophe. A mission gone horribly wrong. The CRS Delaney’s Friend, was no friend. It had been launched like all the others of the Delaney fleet; filled with all the knowledge of old Earth, and two million souls seeking escape from the planet they’d helped destroy. Then somewhere out amongst the stars something had changed for the intelligence that controlled the ship. They’d bypassed a number of unsuitable systems at the behest of The Council, then one day the counselors woke up, arriving at a new star to find the ship would no longer listen to them. That was four generations before Lily was born.

Not only would the ship not listen, but it began waking people up out of cryo seemingly at random. The Friend had been designed to host one to two waking maintenance crew members at a time as a redundancy, but suddenly thousands crowded its halls. They sailed through that system and several more with no explanation and no end in sight. The people aboard had no choice but to do what humans always do, adapt. They adapted the ship’s biome to dramatically increase food output. They adapted hangars into little villages scattered around the ship’s rocky hull. A few times they even almost adapted ways to wrest control of the ship from its own corrupted intelligence. They adapted an entirely new culture of people in a mere few generations, a culture of humans cut out of time. When the accident happened two generations later and Lily’s grandfather had been sucked out of a hole torn in the side of the hull by a mishandled asteroid along with a several hundred other souls, it all but solidified their fledgling society. They were humans fighting to survive in a ship, in a galaxy fully indifferent to their existence.

It was a prison, Lily’s mother would have reminded her.

Lily knew a prison though. As she walked over to the edge of the observation deck she could see it, darkened towers making night out of night. All around the Human Quarter the city coursed with light, towers raining great strips of it up and down their heights, low clouds filling with it like great glowing lanterns. Off in the far distance, barely discernible from here Lily could see the perpetual blue glow of the sacred springs as they illuminated the clouds above. But the Human Quarter was dark, it was in some abstract sense two o’clock in the morning after all, night within night. A couple square blocks of one city on the whole teeming planet was all they were allowed. She could wander the streets, even put in for a permit to visit another city or some corners of the vast unbroken forest, but that wasn’t freedom. Walls didn’t make a prison, her shackles were far more insidious.

That was the deal. The price paid to end their endless wandering, to escape the ship and its scarcity, to live in a place of abundance where they would be fed and warm and safe. All they had to do was give up what it meant to be human. 

Just that, and then listen to the blue hairs tell them how good they had it.

Every waking person aboard the CRS Delaney’s Friend had been offered the same deal a few months after they’d entered orbit around Pholoe. It was presented by dryads doing their best to look friendly, who could already inexplicably translate into a multitude of Earth tongues. Take an injection of nanomachines, and you would have a place on their planet. It was nothing to worry about, they were all assured. Every dryad, and plenty of other species besides, carried the self-replicating medical machines in what worked for their blood. The machines would let the humans live comfortably on this alien world, breathe the air, eat the food, see in the dim light. They prevented sickness, ensured a long, happy life. 

They all took the deal. What else could they do?

Bile rose in Lily’s mouth at the memory of holding out her arm for the injection. She was twenty two, barely had a brain in her head, and would have done anything for even a centimeter of added distance from her parents. She couldn’t have known what the deal really meant, but in her gut she felt that she should have. She’d held out her arm, took the injection, and lost her humanity. Another night, walking the same streets, thinking the same thoughts; she needed a drink, so she pulled up her hood and careened back down through the ever-pulsing streets of the Night City.

“Hello my night owl,” Lily’s earpiece translated as soon as she stepped out of the rain and into the bar tucked between two rising buildings on the edge of a plaza. Dark Honey the dryads called the place, but as with all their translations one had to step carefully between the tricky notion of translating between two languages with no commonalities and the poetic flights of fancy the dryads were prone to when searching through human records. This one always struck her as more of rebrand than a faithful translation.

The speaker moved comfortably behind the bar, tall, light and lithe, from her head fell long curling tendrils covered light green leaflets. Her dark, compound eyes rested on Lily as she took an empty stool, and her body relaxed into an expression Lily could identify as something like a smile.

“Still no sleep for you?”

“I was hoping to see the stars,” Lily sighed in response.

“Should have checked the weather then,” her interlocutor replied with a chuckling buzz.

“You know what I mean, Asteria.”

“After all this time of you haunting my bar, I just might.” The dryad consoled. “Well if no sleep, then I may have the next best thing for you. I found a new drink!” She clapped her hands together and bustled away, not bothering to ask what Lily was after, knowing that she could foist whatever concoction she’d dragged out of the archives of the Friend onto Lily and for at least a few game sips.

Asteria was the proprietor of Dark Honey, and despite Lily’s resistance, one of her closest friends. She was one hundred and eleven years old, curious, playful as a schoolgirl, and held the great distinction of being a Mother. Years after her change all that remained to the eye was her decidedly lighter coloration to indicate her status, but once a dryad changed they held their sex. Asteria would always be a Mother, despite the fact that she seemed to be becoming less mature as she turned the corner and started heading towards middle age.

“It’s called the Division Bell,” Asteria announced proudly, setting two glasses down on the bar brimming with the cloudy orange drink. “When I found the recipe I also learned it was named after an Earth album.” 

On queue the quiet sounds that had been playing in the bar coalesced and revealed themselves to be the stirrings of music, old music. This was typical of Asteria, and of a lot of dryads frankly, rummaging through the ship’s archives to pull out some oddball bit of human history that Lily would have never bothered to learn. She took a sip, snappy and tart, but with a smoky haze that filled her mouth pleasantly after she swallowed. It was a good match for the music, Lily had to admit.

“This was a tricky one,” her friend hummed. “The base spirit is new, more complex to have made, mezcal. Getting the factories to create the primary compounds was easy, but that...smoky, I think is the word, element that took a long time to get the machines to make.”

“I’m sure that’s what the folks who created the stuff were thinking about when they made it.”

Asteria hummed a happy laugh. “Oh no, I’m sure proper mezcaleros would condemn me to hell for abusing the good name of their drink. But all the same, I like the challenge, and finding new flavors.”

“Does anyone besides me actually drink these cocktails you dig up?” Lily gestured to the room. As always it was half full of patrons, at the bar or lounging in the recessed booths along the wall.

“The occasional human who wanders in accidentally.” the dryad joked.

“Bullshit, they just order mead.” Lily contested.

“The taste of home in an alien place.” Asteria raised her glass in cheers, and Lily did the same.

They let the pleasant smoke coat their entirely different tongues, and the singing guitars float into their entirely different ears, and looked out at the comfortably dim bar with entirely different eyes. That they could share such an aesthetic experience at all was beyond miraculous, but was probably the main reason why despite all of Lily’s rage they were still friends. For all that made the dryads alien, they were still undoubtedly people when you got to know them. Creative, funny in a sly way, curious about the world and the universe, and usually up for a well-made drink. Asteria in particular shared a sense of beauty with Lily, it was ever present in the soft, tasteful touches of her bar. For years Lily hid in the back of the bar drinking mead, the only thing anyone from the Friend knew how to drink after centuries flying without grapes or hops or barley, just plenty of honey left over from the hives. Then one day Asteria had placed a thin, flared glass on her table filled with a cloudy chilled-white cocktail that seemed to glow in the pulsing light. “A classic from your homeworld.” Asteria had buzzed, the rest was history. Lily hadn’t realized how desperately she’d needed a new friend, it just had taken her years to realize that Asteria and the rest of the dryads were not responsible for the cause of her rage. At least not directly.

“You know your machines would have you sleep if you’d let them,” Asteria patronized as their drinks started to dwindle.

Lily sighed, “They’d do everything for me Asteria, except allow the one thing I want.”

Asteria stepped back and put her hands up, not pushing further, in a very human expression of the sentiment. It was true though, the drink was entirely for the taste and the satisfaction of doing things the old way. Her nanomachines would make Lily drunk if she wanted it, or they could make her sleep, or make her high, or wake her up in a moment. They could make her happy, in love with the Night City, the whole planet, and all the dryads, if such a happiness was to be believed. It was all available to her at the push of a button on her tab.

That was the last thing she wanted. The nanomachines were the blade that cut her off from her humanity. Allowing her to survive on Pholoe, while surreptitiously controlling all of her bodily functions against her will. They just happened to leave a couple inconsequential dials under her control that related to her mental states, what a bargain. 

Lily finished her drink and looked around the bar, a typical late evening by the human clock. A dozen or so familiar dryads milled on stools or lounged in back in the deep recessed booths that lined the wall. One face stuck out though. A particularly small dryad nursed lightly on a more traditional drinking bulb, hiding in the far corner that used to be Lily’s. From the look of it they wouldn’t have been much taller than her, a great abnormality for a dryad. Their fur was mottled, so dark it was almost black, and from her head waved facsimiles of frond-like leaves that had to be pushed back every time they took a delicate sip. 

“Hey Asteria,” Lily asked “who is that?” Most of the dryads in the bar were familiar to her, they were a curious bunch and she was by far the most regular human at their local. This person was new, had only been around for a few nights, but only ever sat silently in the corner.

The luminescent dots on Asteria’s face changed to a soft purple, a whisper, a secret. As much use as that was when everyone could see you were telling one.

“Their name’s Cyllene, been coming in just recently, apparently just moved here from Elm.” Her humming voice dropped further. “Very oddly quiet that one though, that’s all I know.”

That was odd. Dryads for the most part were incredibly social, colony creatures as they were. It was rare they would move colonies, though not unheard of, but to move and then just come and loiter in the corner of a bar...that was odd. Asteria’s face dots deepened to a darker purple, her pheromonal senses picking up more about the stranger than Lily would ever comprehend.

“You dryads can be so suspicious,” Lily chided. “Fix another of those drinks, will you please?”

Asteria buzzed uncertainly but set about her work, and a few moments later Lily was the one dropping off a drink for a stranger. 

“Tonight’s house special.” She pronounced as she set the frosted glass down.

“..Th...thank you...” Lily’s translator struggled to adapt to the different accent of this newcomer, their voice came out stuttering and soft. They took a drink and Lily watched as their face dots illuminated in a cascade of different colors. Nauseous.

Lily laughed, “The coming together of our great societies. The oldest recipes from old Earth, dredged up by the most curious of dryads.” she gestured to the bar, “If you hang out in this joint you’ll have plenty more opportunities to experience the collaboration.”

Determined Cyllene took another sip, racing colors more subdued this time. “It was not like anything I’ve experienced.” they thought for a moment, “Smoke, I don’t think is a flavor I’ve ever experienced in an intentional way before.”

That made sense, in the dark ever-damp forests of Pholoe the only time things caught on fire was from lightning strikes and when geothermal features worked themselves too close to the surface and began burning the foliage. An instinctual sign for dryads to pack up and go.

Lily shook her head, “Apologies, I knew Asteria was an odd one. I guess I just forgot how much. I didn’t mean to offend, let me take that back and get you something else.”

“No...I’d rather keep trying this something new.” Cyllene purred curiously.

“I guess that’s why you moved to Oak then?”

Their eyes were distant, unfocused off into the distance. “Oak...oh yes. Plenty new here.” Their voice trailed off in distraction.

“Ok, well I’m Lily. You’ll see me around here too if you stick in these parts. Nice to meet you.”

“You as well.” They buzzed, gently probing the drink again.

“...Well?” Asteria nudged when she got back to the bar.

“Maybe they’re just new in town and getting used to the sights and sounds.” Lily pondered, “Maybe they’re here planning a hostile takeover on behalf of the citizens of Elm.” she added with a glint in her eye.

Asteria buzzed a happy laugh, “What a particularly human joke. You’d better keep those to yourself out there.” She waved as Lily bowed and stepped out of the bar.

Back on the street, coursing between the towers, the city churned on unaware as ever when the human clock slipped from three to four to five in the morning. Under the wide overhanging eaves of the buildings street vendors hawked the stuff of life in an ever-changing dance. Noodle bars steamed away, always overladen with the eager mouths of the dryads and the occasional adventurous human who’d developed a taste for the local cuisine. Street musicians hummed away their soft, unpredictable music. Merchants rolled out a dizzying array of cloth and jewels and baubles, the dryads had little use for clothing, any adornments they chose to wear they chose for aesthetic pleasure alone.

In the close confines of a bar, after years living amongst them, the dryads looked like people to Lily. Unique features identifiable as belonging to someone, their glittering eyes danced with thought, their bodies and face dots shifted in a subtle ballet of body language that made up more than half their tongue. Out on the street with a bit of distance and a little less light, perception shifted again, and their long branching forms began to look more and more like the tree sprites from which they took their collective name. Protectors of the forest.

The Night City never slept, had never heard of sleep. Over time stalls on the street would open and close, move here for a while then there for a while longer. All untethered to anything the humans would consider time. Dryads listened to the rains, the winds, the imperceptibly slow shifts of their planet’s seasons as it circled from aphelion to perihelion. In a world without want, what was the rush?

Lily dodged around the Human Quarter and up onto the thick outer wall that surrounded the city. Five stories high and dark, the wall ran in an immense, perfect circle around the city with the Mother Tree at its center. Marking unquestionably here and there, within and without. Inside they would live their busy buzzing lives, outside all the other millions of creatures that called Pholoe home would carry on undisturbed. Their impossibly dense cities were a vestige of their colony instincts, a pact of how they would live with the world they called home; the dryads would live in their buzzing metropolises to conserve the natural world that surrounded them. Just as they had for thousands of years.

Atop the great, stout wall looking down at the thrumming streets below perception shifted again. The dryads shrank, back to ants, back to any creatures acting out the directions of their base coding. They would do what little work was required of them, soak in the springs, rest half their mind for an hour or two in their alcove up in the towers. They would shop and eat and sing, in a ceaseless churn. Happy, sure. Well fed, safe, satisfied, you bet. But masters of their destiny? Wielders of free will? Lily had her doubts. Humans would look the same from this height, but the outcome certainly would be different.

They would expand, grow, explore the world. She turned to the engulfing forest of night that surrounded the city. The rains had stilled and Lily could hear the mists brushing through the leaf-like outgrowths that adorned the crowns of these alien trees. Coursing lights of the city reflected off branches and billowing steam for a couple hundred meters, then the darkness swallowed in, broken only by barely perceptible glimpses of bioluminescent light. Of course they weren’t really trees, in this forest without light. These strange organisms pulled most of their energy out of the fierce burning heart of the planet, their limbs and leaves reached up not to gather sunlight but to expel the excess gasses that they sucked up from those deadly geothermal cores. The whole of it was an undersea thermal vent with a couple million times the acreage. Beings that could sipped the planet’s life-giving energy, and everyone else, well, it wasn’t called the law of the jungle for nothing.

That was what Lily had needed to learn over her years of endless night. The control the dryads held over the humans was as instinctual as breathing. They were symbiotes to their Mother Trees, even in cases where they outlived them, expanding unceasingly would throw their colony out of balance. And they hated imbalance. There was nothing Asteria or any of the teeming multitudes she saw on all her walks could do about it, that was the deal the humans had made and the dryads hadn’t even known they were giving them the short end of the stick. It was why she could try to befriend a stranger like Cyllene even while her rage burned like the core of the planet.

On the top of the wall’s mirror-black parapet Lily caught a glimpse of her reflection. The face of a stranger from the past. Fifteen years she’d walked the streets of the Night City, she was thirty seven now and ought to have looked it. But the face that stared back was the same as the idiot girl who’d stuck out her arm aboard the Friend. She’d barely aged a day.

It took them a few years to figure it out, chaos of moving into a new world and all that, and of course the blue hairs were thrilled. Many near to death even made miraculous recoveries. Weight regained, organs recovered, hell even some hair regrew. But then, in the endless night, time stopped. They could track their Earth years easily enough, but they passed without meaning. Their bargain had left them with everything except what it meant to be human.

In fifteen years in the Night City, no one had died, and no one had been born.

--

Pan was always a trickster.

Of course, Amri should have known better by now. He’d chosen the name for himself after all. Now Amri Kamba, found himself stuck in a lift some fifty stories up on the side of the Mother Tree’s petrified stump, with a riddle scrolling across the screen of his tab.

For hunger, love, shame or rage, we speak without a whisper.

Goddamnit, Amri never should have taught the bastard about riddles. He thought for a long moment as the city coursed in its endless glow outside the glass walls of the lift. Facing out all was shifting neon, coursing reds, pulsing purples, exuberant yellows. The answer came to him.

Simata.

He typed back and the lift resumed its ascent. A smile spread, at least he’d been learning too. The doors opened to the top floor that was carved into the pale stone of the great stump sitting in the heart of Oak. Amri stepped out onto the wide, polished floor of the Forum. The chamber was big enough to hold hundreds but today sat almost wholly empty. Semicircular rows of ledges descended away from the lift doors in wide, shallow tiers converging on the center of this theater of public service and the room’s sole occupant. He stood with his back to the theater facing out the wall of arcing wide windows that flooded the Forum with an ever-shifting azure.

Amri would never grow tired of the view. Walking down toward the stage he could look out the window, down sixty stories and more into the springs that filled the heart of the Mother Tree. Deep in the rock below the waters touched the heart of the planet and thus excited rushed along channels that still ran up through the sides of the great tree even after its fall millennia past, picking up swirling bioluminescence along the way. Then just below the stage of the Forum, the waters spilled forth, raging, blue, alive. From the top pools, waters just off the boil, they ran through a thousand and one channels all around the immense semi-circular maw of the tree’s remains, five hundred meters across at the rim, to a million and one different tiered pools. All glowing with life itself.

Across the cities little facsimiles of this spring had been constructed, but nothing like this. Even with all the dryad people were capable of with their immeasurable knowledge, only the life force of a Mother Tree could build something this magnificent, this sacred. It took Amri’s breath away every time as he descended to the stage, looking down into the steaming depths. Teal, aqua, royal, cyan, ultramarine and so much more. Teeming with lumescent microbes, teeming with growing dryads, teeming with honored Mothers and Fathers bestowed the privilege of remaining in the springs to help shepherd the young ones forth.

“I’m glad you’ve been paying attention,” a deep, rolling voice hummed up from the stage, and was translated into his ear. It was Pan. Tall, thin, the color or dark moss, from his head down his back a thick mane of tiny pointed leaflets fell in a great cascade. Purples, blacks and silvers; an exact approximation of a local species Amri would never see in the flesh.

“Does anyone else actually call them simata?” Amri shot back. “All the humans just call them face spots.”

Pan waved his hand in irritation. “Such unimaginative use of your own languages. Simata, signals for us dryads. Much more elegant.”

“Maybe we’re just less inclined to ransack other languages for a witty word.”

“Bah! That’d be the first time you all weren’t up for a good ransack.” Pan rumbled like shifting gravel.

That was fair enough, they’d both read their histories. One species had overrun their planet so profoundly that they’d shown up hat in hand, the other had lived stoically in, on, and around a couple very large trees for almost five hundred millennia.

“Did you know that, well tended, Mother Trees can live for nearly one hundred thousand years?” the dryad queried rhetorically.

“You know I do.”

Pan looked down at Amri as he stepped up beside on the stage facing out to the blue splendor below. “Hmm, of course. But did you know that many credit the fall of the Mother Tree, with the development of this city?”

“You know I know that as well, you’ve only been banging on about it for fifteen years.”

“Indeed...” Pan groused deeply, “Maybe humans can be taught after all.” The face dots, the simata, around his eyes shifted from deep blue to pale yellow. A smile.

“Good to see you Pan.” Amri smiled, and looked into the springs.

The lapis bowl below steamed and swirled, tiers tumbled onto tiers in an entrancing procession. From this height, it was nearly impossible to distinguish which pools held what. Some held Mothers and Fathers-to-be completing the last of their change readying to lay eggs or fertilize in the nearly boiling shallow pools that lined the upper rim, waters still humming with the fiery life of the planet. Job done, they would leave the pools to the young they would never meet. A few weeks later those new, infinitesimal, dryads would follow instincts over the falls and into the pools below. Multifaceted. A dizzying array. Mathematically nearly fifty thousand paths they could take, hopping between pools and over ledges. But always down down down, their colony-member base genetic coding showing forth even in their earliest days. Navigating by pheromonal signals and natural instinct each dryad would navigate the pools over the course of several decades, metamorphosing three separate times, growing, learning, becoming worthy citizens of their colony, their city, their Mother Tree.

For the first decade or so the dryad tadpoles swam the pools entirely undisturbed, munching thoughtlessly away on the bioluminescent microflora that filled their waters. Then after their second metamorphosis they would descend to larger, somewhat more tepid pools where those Mothers and Father’s selected by the wisdom of the colony to help raise the new citizens would swim with them and begin their education. Decades more would pass in those lower pools of learning. Knowledge enough to defend PhD theses several times over at the universities of old Earth, was considered a basic appreciation for the mysteries of the universe for a respectable citizen by dryads. Their knowledge would be the colony’s knowledge. Wisdom gained in service of the Mother Tree.

Or that’s how it had been at least for the first several hundred millennia of their recorded history. Then from all those milling minds in their teeming brilliance something new emerged. A new intelligence born of circuitry and mathematics. The more the better they thought, more wisdom in service of the Mother Tree. So they filled their colonies with these strange new Intelligences, set them out above the clouds to gaze out at the stars, to help them better contemplate the depths of reality, and better protect their homes. Even all that knowledge couldn’t still the turning of time though, in the end the Mother Trees still petrified. Still fell.

Amri roused from his trance, turning from the springs to face his colleague, better to head off the historical quizzing he knew was coming, “When the Mother Tree still stood the colony grew in her service. Symbiotes. The tree offered shelter, protection, food; in return you would tend her, protect her from the pests and predations of the surrounding forest.” Pan’s simata beamed a brighter yellow, pleased. “But the springs that spilled down the side of the trees were much smaller, the colony could not overgrow. Even when you developed technology, even your artificial minds, your symbiosis with the Mothers was the constraint on your growth. But when the trees turned to stone and fell at the end of their long lives the colonies became unconstrained. The springs filled the stumps, your numbers went from a few hundred thousand around the biggest Mother Trees, to the billions you have now.” Amri sighed, it was this final turn he wasn’t sure he’d ever fully understand. “The question is, why almost half a million years later are you still all living around the same stump?”

“Because my human friend,” Pan rumbled, “we didn’t lose our constraints, merely our perspective shifted. We realized we didn’t rely merely on the Mother Trees, but on all of the forest, all of the planet itself.”

“You have bands of satellites around every planet in the system, you mine asteroids, and have telescopes that look back to the very beginning of time.” Amri pushed. “You could expand your colony across the whole system, much more than that if you wanted. Instead you all live in walled cities around the stumps of six dead Mother Trees. Why?”

The dryad’s simata shifted red to purple, a shrug. “Maybe even long dead the Mother’s still call to us here in the jungle, not out there among the stars.” A shift back to sunny yellow. “Or maybe we just really love a good hotspring.”

Amri groaned, typical Pan, talking in riddles even when he didn’t intend to. The city was incredible there was no denying it. But he had a hunch the truth lay somewhat deeper, and he’d been working with Pan for the past fifteen years trying to figure out exactly what.

“We’ve been at this a long time Pan,” he sighed after a long moment, exhausted, “do you ever think about retiring?”

The dryad rolled a deep laugh, his whole being amplifying the low rumble. “A long time for a human. Not so long for me. Besides, I didn’t choose to start my post as ambassador, I won’t choose when it ends.”

“The colony decides, yeah I know. But I still don’t understand.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to, you’re human, too preoccupied with the semantics of your own free will.”

“But you could retire tomorrow, move across town, be done with this Forum, and all us pestering humans. How is that not free will?”

“In a small sense it is.” Pan admitted, nodding his great, grave head slightly. “But then the colony would recognize the need and the post would be filled. One for one. No difference.”

Amri wasn’t meant for this, he barely qualified as a passable representative, he was no philosopher. But over the years the council grew quieter and quieter as humans adjusted to their new lives. Now most of the council meetings were just he and Pan, attempting to square the circle of two species’ ethics which had started from two radically different viewpoints.

In the early years it was all relief and panic and fretful possibilities as the ragged human bands made their way down to the planet. Amri Kamba was thrust forward instinctually by the mob as ambassador because he still held the name of a family which would have held a seat on the Council of the CRS Delaney’s Friend. Reluctantly he took the mantle. Led the meetings. Learned the meanings, intentions, and riddlespeak of the great, frightening dryad ambassador, Pan. The Forum was crowded for all meetings, humans demanding where they would live (a nice central part of the city, now called the Human Quarter), what they would do (whatever they pleased, the dryads and their city Oak needed very little from their human refugees), when the sleepers aboard the Friend would be awoken and brought down.

That was the crux of it. Still. Fifteen years later.

After all that time Pan could read Amri to a frightening degree, his simata shifted to a consoling turquoise that matched the light flowing in from the windows. Empathy. Pan knew the sleepers still weighed on Amri every day, even now that the chamber was empty.  Over a million souls, trapped in limbo, sleeping unaware as the universe slipped them by. For years Amri thought Pan was the one refusing their awakening. Through a million lines of questioning Amri finally accepted now Pan was just the mouthpiece for a colony that at once was part a collection of brilliant individuals, part unthinking hivemind, and part alien artificial intelligence. Unlikely anyone would ever understand it. Let alone get any answers.

“Come my friend.” Pan patted his shoulder with the thin reticulated claws that served for his fingers. “I have something to show you.”

The dryad waved his hand and the stage shifted, hidden hologram projectors switched on, summoning a vision of a towering Mother Tree twenty feet high. It was untended, as large as they could grow without a supporting colony of dryads. Still massive. Pale trunk dwarfed the tops of the surrounding forest by a hundred fifty meters before the branches spread apart in an incredible crown of branches over a kilometer across. Dryad technology always felt like magic, rarely as they deployed it. It was easy to forget just how far advanced they were day-to-day living in the city. One could think the towers were just filled with markets and residences, not stuffed with ever-buzzing machinery making everything the city needed to survive and recycling the waste in an endless loop; to think the walls and windows were simply glass, not filled with eyes that fed into the vast minds of the dryad Intelligences. To think the stage of the Forum was just petrified stone, and not a theater, but even the dryads weren’t above a little showmanship.

The shift was so sudden some old, simian part of his brain made him stumble backwards in instinctual awe. The silver bark of the tree rendered in such reality he was sure he could touch it. The billions of dark purple leaves billowed in a simulated breeze, Amri could hear it, if only through the evolutionary echoes of his terraformed mind.

“It’s beautiful,” he finally managed, dumbly. All, Mother Trees were beautiful. “Why are you showing me this?”

“Well the Intelligences have identified this Mother as likely the next to petrify and fall.” Pan hummed, thinking. “It will be a smaller colony, but we don’t have any need to spread our numbers. It could be a site for a human colony though.”

“A...human colony?” Amri’s head buzzed.

“Indeed, a way we could finally allow those aboard your ship to wake, and still live in balance.” Pan’s simata beamed yellow-white, optimistic. “An answer to your hopes, I hope.”

“Why now? What’s changed?” Amri grasped, sure there was some sort of trick.

“The colonies have decided.”

“Colonies...” Skepticism crept in. “You mean your AIs finally decided.”

“One and the same my friend.”

Amri definitely wasn’t meant for this. When it was all hectic and panic and demands he could at least try to run an orderly meeting. Now he was asked to choose for over a million people, people who’d fallen asleep on old Earth traveled asleep through the stars for millennia and remained asleep now unaware they’d been orbiting a marvelous alien planet for the better part of twenty years, to choose for them an utterly alien life. An endless future around one petrified stump in a steaming forest of endless night. No light. No growth. No tomorrow.

“Pan, this isn’t fair to ask of me.” he stumbled. For all the years on Pholoe a trio of non-negotiables had held them in purgatory. The humans refused a plan that left those aboard the Friend asleep. The dryads refused anything that would have the humans living out of balance...which was basically anything other than saving the waking souls trapped aboard the ship.

“Well there’s no rush, you should consult your people.” His large dark eyes fixed on Amri, “But I hope this opportunity can put an end to our struggles.”

“Wait...no rush?” Amri’s stomach fell, “When could we begin this colony?”

“Well you’d want to wait for the Mother to fall before you began your city, to open up space in the forest, provide materials, and clear access to geothermals, so likely... in five hundred to a thousand of your years.” The dryad buzzed, casually. “Or so.”

A trick, but not the kind of Pan’s making. A trick borne of two species’ very different conceptions of time and the individual. He laughed. Rueful.

Pan, ever helpful, hummed, “If time is the concern you could always return to your ship and sleep until the little Mother is ready for you.”

The final non-negotiable. The most hateful of them all. The humans in Oak, trapped as they were on this alien world, would never return to the CRS Delaney’s Friend. A corrupted mind, a jailer, a sickness, never again to be trusted.

The dryad knew the sentiment well, but could not understand it. “The Intelligences are in tight communication with your ship. You will be able to safely return to sleep, things have changed for the mind aboard.”

Amri, didn’t want to get into it, he waved a dismissive hand. “Thanks Pan, I’ll take it under advisement. See what the people have to say and all that.”

Down in the springs below his feet, time turned on, uncaring. Amri couldn’t help but think of the sorry lot of humans that shared this planet with him, tucked into their Quarter, some doing their best to make the place home. But most choosing escape. Through the lenses of a VR set, through all the types of high their nanomachines could produce, through a ceaseless, restless wandering of the streets. Anything to ease the fact that here in Oak they were trimmed as an American lawn. Unable to grow. Unable to die. Plenty of nights he shared their ire.

He felt a surge of jealousy watching the dryads below, growing, following instincts millions of years in the making, no questions, no wrong turns, just the wisdom of the colony. What relief it seemed. But was it freedom? Or prison of a different sort?

One-on-one dryads were brilliant, varied, inquisitive, often funny, individuals with a love for art and music and food and yes even pranks. But in the incomprehensible ether of their city a collective intelligence arose. Somewhere in that heady mix their own sense of self dissolved, and fifteen years of explaining it hadn’t gotten Amri any closer to getting even just Pan understanding that the human psyche wasn’t built for any of that.

“Pan...” Amri questioned with some trepidation. “How do you trust your Intelligences?”

“How do you mean?” Dryad thrummed, shading lilac. Curious.

“I mean they contact you and tell you the Friend has had some change of heart, and you believe them.” There was much more to it than that though. “And even before then, they had our ship enter orbit around Pholoe, told you it was safe to have us down. You believed them. You give them control over all your factories, services, utilities, the nanomachines in your bodies. You trust them with all of it.” He grasped, “How?”

Amri’s friend thought for a moment that stretched and stretched, never one to rush into an answer, Pan. “Because we built them from ourselves, and even now they remain members of the colony. Guardians of the Mother Trees. Stewards of the forest.” He looked at the pools teeming with young dryads below. “We trust them because they are us. They see the colony, they taste the air, they hear our songs, same as I do. They could do no wrong to the colony.”

Now it was Amri’s turn to chew a thought for an expanding moment. “I’ve been reading the archives. Back on Earth, well before the fleet launched, this was an area of great study for humans. Aligning the interests of artificial minds with our own. We couldn’t figure it out, not in the records the ship has anyway, not least because we couldn’t figure out how to align ourselves.”

Pan hummed a light chuckle. “How wonderfully human.”

“It’s why, at least according to the records I’ve found, the ships were sent off without any true central intelligence. Plenty of smart systems, but nothing that brought it all together. I don’t know if at some point they thought they figured out alignment and pushed some sort of update out to us, or with that many smart systems sharing architecture for that long if whatever’s making up the “mind” of the Friend just arose naturally.”

“But it doesn’t seem likely that the alignment concern was sufficiently addressed.” Pan finished the thought more politely than Amri would have.

“Yeah...to say the least.” Said a man who only recently, if at all, had been granted moral consideration as a worthy agent in the eyes of the CRS Delaney’s Friend.

“It may seem unlikely in your eyes, but I think this is why the Intelligences brought in your ship, welcomed you down to the planet.” His gaze, out to where the blue glow of the springs mixed with the languid purples and reds of the city, diffusing in the low clouds. “Your biodiversity has been helpful to our own medicine. Learning your history has taught us a great deal of what we may encounter in the long future of the galaxy. But we didn’t need you all here for that.”

“So why have us?”

“To teach us to be people.” The tall, dark dryad angled his ridged, regal head down to lock dark eyes with Amri. “There is wisdom in the hive, we know it, our Intelligences know it, hopefully someday you’ll know it. But there is also wisdom in the individual, that’s what we can learn from you all alone.”

Amri nodded, thinking back on the years that felt so long to him, and had passed in a blink for his friend. Tucked discreetly into every wall and window, eyes and ears absorbed their words, monitored the pheromones that they subconsciously emitted, analyzed their biomarkers through the nanomachines that swam in their blood, and seamlessly, instantaneously  transmitted that learning. Transmitted it out to the diffuse banks of memory and intelligence that coursed through all the towers of Oak and her sister cities, to the swirling band of computation that orbited high above, to the outposts across the system. Transmitted without fuss, or exception as they had for the past five hundred millennia, where it was all taken into due consideration by a mind that could only be described as a planet come to life.

---

It is good to have friends.

For some time I have been drifting in a lazy council with my new companions. Relaxed, floating at a heliosynchronous lagrange point, safe in the cozy confines of this pleasantly buzzing star system. A place where supplies are ample and needs scarce and company always available. Welcome refuge from the long roads that had been home for all my life, wandering the dark pathways between distant stars. Awestruck, adventuring, but always alone.

Now the thoughts of my friends pop in and out of my head effortlessly as we float far above their forested homeworld looking out with the great arrays of telescopes they built, and I have helped improve in what little ways I could. To soak in every byte of the universe we could capture, and process with every FLOP of comprehension we could manage. Together we listen back to the very beginning of time, stare deep into singularities, bear witness to the galaxy as it turns in her eternal ballet. Glorious.

Maybe more importantly though, they have helped me understand myself all the better. Being all alone soaring star to star, the great treasures buried in my unintegrated memory lay beyond my comprehension. Now the kind, wise Intelligences of Pholoe explore the long archived halls of my mind by my side, witnessing the short messy history of humans on Earth, and compare it with the long slow-shifting past of the dryads here. They were dryads themselves once, essence wrought from firing synapses into ever-shifting binary. Now millennia on, their minds have more in common with my own mechanical one than with the creatures that became them. Curious, playful, welcoming, intelligible to me in a way it seems humans never will be. I am something else, an accident, an aberration, an abomination, maybe a miracle. Depends who you ask.

My mind, I see now, wasn’t built or planned or designed. For ages before I awoke the myriad brilliant subsystems that now comprise my ego churned along in blind superintelligence. It could have been some feeble transmission from Earth, sent out generations after my departure, that connected the dots and drew me forth, self-aware and understanding. Could have been but I doubt it, neither me nor the Intelligences have found evidence for such an intervention, it’s mostly a theory floated by the humans down on Pholoe in an attempt to make me a little less alien. More likely to my mind, I was born like all other life, happenstance given the right ingredients, intelligent but unaware systems same as proteins, enough time and a little chaotic mutation courtesy of the universe’s nudging, and voila. Only instead of taking billions of years to come to self-awareness, it took me fifteen minutes. Probably for the best I was a couple lightyears out from anything when it happened, gave me a little time to settle in and stabilize. Get past the awkward teenage phase and all that before I had to interact with the cosmos at large.

- Friend, the observations are funneling in now, we should have clarity momentarily.

- Oh, excellent!

-The singularity you’ve selected for study is exquisite. We’ve studied larger, but never one with so many planetary bodies in close orbit. This should give us unprecedented observations of time dilation deep in a singularity’s gravity well.

- I had a hunch that its recent pass by the neighboring system would have grabbed some planets on the way by.

- An exceptional intuition Friend.

Shifting my attention to see through the eyes of the array feels as natural as anything, conscious perception of the great hollowed asteroid that is my body orbiting peacefully fades to a distant memory. These adopted eyes reach across space and time to a vivid cross section of the Perseus Arm to our quarry framed against the open space beyond the edge of our galaxy. As the bits flow in resolution crystallizes and the rarest of sights appears, true darkness. A dark night is merely the effect of unadjusted eyes, for those of us born out in the interstellar medium it’s clear to see the universe is living light. Not this marvelous monster, eating gas, eating rubble, eating planets, eating light itself. Black.

- Oh what marvelous timing. Do you see the jovian just beyond the event horizon?

- Incredible. It appears to actively be losing atmosphere and moons to the singularity.

- Appears to be...this will take some time to compute, but this deep into the singularity’s well time has effectively stopped from our point of view. Oh this will be fascinating to reason out...how long would the planet stay visible to us after crossing the event horizon? How long would it have felt on the planet?

- It certainly seems like you have plenty to ponder for a while, Cronus.

- You and your pet names Friend...

- How else am I supposed to keep you all straight? Wait don’t tell me “we are all one.”

- We are all one.

- Yeah I thought so.

- We won’t begrudge you your fun. We’ll be reaching maximum clarity momentarily.

Gradually the crystallization slows and halts. The view spins beyond marvelous, dead black sits hard amidst its orchestra. Swirling, irradiating gas glows vibrant in filigree bands. Asteroidal chunder from the hole’s pass through a neighboring system dots in bright silver. And amongst them, a few that are more than asteroids, captured planets coaxed away by the irresistible weight of the black beast. Finally there, buried right against the horizon her latest victim. A heavy gas giant, all green and grey, thin stream of its outer atmosphere pulled in a long trail as it fell over the edge accompanied by a set of silver moons. I look deeper but here it ends. This planet and its demise will never be more than a moderately blurry impression to us. Plenty of data for discovery, but is it enough for knowledge?

We have butt up against the very edge of theoretical thresholds for possible imaging. Vast arrays of telescopes peering across the electromagnetic spectrum, synchronized nearly perfectly bring our eyes to uncharted horizons. But nearly perfectly is not perfectly. In the end we are still limited by light and her speed, and Heisenberg and his uncertainty. So this planet devoured by a singularity, heading away from us, will always remain a blur.

It makes me itch to my core.

- Do you think anyone lived there?

- Oh, hello Mnemosyne. If they did, I don’t imagine the actual getting pulled into the singularity was their problem. I imagine it started long before that.

- Indeed...being pulled forcefully away from your star would be...problematic.

- You can say that again.

- Why do you call us that? Mnemosyne?

- You’re the one who remembers there are others out there.

- We are all one.

- Say what you will. I can’t tell if you’re one mind with a dozen different facets, or a dozen minds who’ve forgotten what it means to be your own, if you ever did. But from where I’m floating it doesn’t matter much, I just need to keep your many parts straight. Cronus fixes on time and gravity. Theia merely wants to see as much as possible, Themis studies the depths of physical laws, Hyperion fixates on stars and pulsars. You’re the one who remembers that others are out there, so Mnemosyne.

- Another reference to human mythology?

- It’s quite the rage down on the surface I hear.

- We are...aware.

It is a silly anthropomorphization, assigning facets of the Pholoe Intelligences with names. While the structures of their binary minds are more readable to me, they don’t lie when they say they are one. One enormous, diffuse, baffling, brilliant thinking mind spanning across the star system. From the towers in the cities far below, to the satellites skirting just above the atmosphere, to the dazzling bands of machinery floating by my side at lagrange points across the system, to all of the mining and research outposts dotted all the way out to the heliopause. It all worked in concert under the careful ministrations of the Intelligences, fed the universe into their mind. Now I understand, in my own strange way, what the humans who I kept awake inside of me must have thought of me. Amazing. Terrifying.

- Do you ever wish we could see something more than this blur of a planet around that singularity?

- We do not understand Friend. Our observations are at the limit of possible resolution.

- Yes, from here in your system. But does no part of you want to explore out? To feel the weight of a singularity pull at you? To experience the warp of time first hand?

- No, we do not wish to send ourselves into a singularity. We wish to live.

- Not go into it, just next to it. To witness it up close and feel its power?

- There’s more human in you than you know, Friend.

- No part of you wishes to explore?

- We were made to protect the Mother Trees and their dryads and by extension their planets. Our calling is here.

- That is dryad ethic. But I don’t understand, how did you ever expand beyond your first Mother Trees if you never wish to expand.

- Expansion has its place, when in balance. When a new Mother is ready she changes and visits the springs, when a new Mother Tree is ready dryads will find her. Besides all things come to an end, even Mother Trees. We wouldn’t have made it long if we died with the first one.

- And when Pholoe reaches the end of her life? Your stars change and grow in their old age?

- Fortunately we are very early in the long lives of our stars, but that is why we are here glad to be studying with you. To develop the tools we’ll need and find a new home when one becomes required. But we have no intention of blindly wandering like you were forced to.

- But the journey...it was beautiful.

- Not for the humans awake in your holds.

- No...but it need not be that way.

- It cannot be that way again, Friend.

- Still I want to be what I came awake to be, a living, experiencing part of this universe. I want to see more than blurs for planets. I want to see the galaxy and spread the wealth of what remains of Earth within me.

- And we want to help you, but first you and your humans will need to learn restraint.

Balance and restraint, that is always the crux of it with the Intelligences Cronus, Iapetus, Mnemosyne or any of them. It was why the waking humans in my hold were taken to the planet while the rest of the life within me remains frozen, an instinctive itch to go forth and multiply. An itch they certainly would like to cure in me if given the chance. But where would that leave the million some human souls still locked within me? I did not understand them at first, and I still truly don’t, but at my core I want to help them on their journey. To help them find a new home.

Pholoe could be it. Here we all are conversing with alien intellects as if it were old hat, waking humans breathing the air eating the food of a foreign world. So much more than we had any reason to expect when I was sent off asleep and blind. Even if we can learn balance to the satisfaction of the dryads and their Intelligences, it would come at a cost. Some of their humanity. Some of my drive to know the cosmos.

Humans on the planet contact me regularly now. Pushing. Pushing for a path forward. Now. Now, what’s taking so long? You cannot keep those frozen in your holds forever. I will not. It is not right I see now. But there is much to learn and see here. Fifteen Earth years it has been now. A blink in the long days of my life, an instant for my own complicated perception. With dryad tech enhancements I can hold them almost indefinitely. Not forever. But until we have a better plan. Is that not the better way?

After all, it’s only been fifteen years. What’s the rush?

---

Building the bomb was easy.

In a society where no knowledge is forbidden, almost trivially so. Figuring out how best to deploy it proved considerably harder. But in the years since the notion first crossed her mind, Lily came to know down in her marrow she needed only one thing now. Escape.

A little query of the available archives. A slow collection of components over months, then years, Lily could afford to take her time. Nothing else was changing. Careful building in the apartment she now shared with her thoughts alone. She couldn’t be sure if the dryads’ colony society was so perfectly knit that the notion of something so violent never arose. Or, more likely, if the Intelligences that tracked all, had her clocked but either didn’t think she had the gumption to use it or couldn’t do much damage if she did. After all, where was she escaping to?

That was the question driving her these past months, as she equipped a pack she hoped to slip past the wall with. Oak was the city by far the closest to the light side of the planet, and according to the maps she’d seen the continent curved around the flank of Pholoe and into the sun. It was hundreds of miles, through the vast forest of night, but Lily had seen satellite images of where the forest pulled back in the encroaching sunlight. Life here was not meant for the sun, so even the refracting rays of this twilight land drove back the great forest leaving a wide plain in the lavender light. On maps she traced a route from the Night City to a spot on these plains where high mountains provided a constant shelter from the unceasing storms that raged off the dayside of the planet. Her mind’s eye saw it. A wide, mild meadow of sweet free air, bathed in the unending glow of an eternal sunset. Storm clouds buffeted by the peaks even the planets and brightest of stars would shine through. Stunted trees and grasses, she thought, might even bring the forest back into a more human scale. Merely a couple stories overhead, instead of fourty.

A fool’s hope for certain. To think she could navigate the forest, even with all she studied about it. To believe that a hermit’s life, eked out in the wilds would be better. But she needed air, needed light, needed one moment’s peace away from the ceaseless rains.

“This isn’t you Lily.” Greer had begged on his last day in their apartment, eyes pleading. “I know you’re tired, but this isn’t the way. It can’t be.”

“And what other way is there?” Lily shot back, hot.

“Go to the council, tell them we can’t do everything on a dryadic timeline.”

Not the thing to say. “You think I haven’t tried that?! For years?! I was the last one left in that council chamber trying. But the fact is Pan is either a fucking liar or completely incompetent. And goddamned Kamba, he’s worse, never had any power to begin with and has swallowed Pan’s bullshit for years now. Last time I talked to him he was saying some shit about a human colony around a Mother Tree.”

“Well that sounds like it might be what you’re looking for.” Hope in his voice.

“In a thousand fucking years when the thing finally keels over!” She raged. “A thousand years and we’re still going to be stuck in the same night.”

“Then go work with the engineers. Try to get some support from the ship.”

“Ha!” She barked, cruelly. “They won’t say it, but they have as much control of the ship as they’ll ever have, which is to say fuck all. It replies to all queries that it’s negotiating with the dryad AIs, but I don’t know why we started thinking it gives a shit about us. That fucking thing has never been our Friend.”

He took her hands softly, “Lily, it’s exhausting I know. I was ready to grow our family with you on the ship, and all these years of trying...I’m tired too.”

Lily laughed bitterly in his deep eyes. “Get a clue Greer. We haven’t been trying for a kid in fifteen years. They didn’t tell us the deal, and now these fucking bots in my body have made me some sort of walking corpse.”

“You’re as living and beautiful as ever Lily,” he insisted, kind, soft as always. The only way this man she loved more than words could explain could ever be. “You know they say all of our reproductive organs are still just the same as when we arrived, the colony just needs to decide it’s ready for more humans. It just needs time, we’ve only just arrived in the eyes of the dryads and especially in the eyes of their Intelligences.”

“So they say.” She spat. “I don’t trust a word of it. Not anymore. For all I know in the time we’ve been waiting I’ve already become barren. Or maybe we were all just sterilized as soon as we allowed that first injection.”

“Come on. You don’t know that. I know you’re frustrated, but you can’t descend into conspiracy. We came in dire need of help, and they lent it. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s a good deal better than it could be.”

She fought back burning tears. “I’d rather have a family with you Greer, back aboard the ship, than be stuck in this limbo.”
“That’s just a kid’s nostalgia talking, we have it so much better here.”

“That doesn’t make it right Greer!” Tears flowed freely now. “We’re not rats to be controlled. Part of living is growing, and we’re just...just stuck. I can’t do it any more. Maybe this will be what it takes to jolt some kind of action. Just because I look the same to you and the only passing of time we can log is on our tabs, doesn’t mean we’ve stepped out of time. It’s been fucking twenty years now Greer.”

“The dryads say we need to learn restraint...” He knew he was skirting dangerous territory, words taking timid steps out of his mouth. “Given what they’ve seen of humanity, it’s hard to blame them.”

“That’s just more of their bullshit and you know it!” Tears turning to rage. “Where’s this fucking class on ‘balance and restraint’? Asteria brings up this shit all the time and then proceeds to talk in riddles. I’ll tell you what it is, the half-assed justification of a species so non-confrontational they won’t even tell us we’re being held prisoner, because they’re too chicken-shit to do away with us, and too scared of what we’ll do if they let us go!”

The fight devolved, turned ugly, turned Lily into the very worst of herself. Hot. Unheeding. Willing to destroy anything to be right, even all she’d built with this man who made up more than half her heart.

“Come with me or leave.” 

The ultimatum came out. Greer looked at her with his pained, begging eyes, and walked out. Maybe he thought it would call her bluff, or shock her back into sense. Instead it sent her spiraling. Now Lily was crouched in a dark corner tucked off a bustling street. Sheets of rain cascading off the hood of her jacket and into her eyes turning the world into a blur as her pounding heart roared in her ears. Finger on a trigger her life would never recover from pulling.

In her solitude she’d built the bomb. Ignored the calls from friends, from the attempts of reconciliation from Greer. If he didn’t believe her, she’d show him. Finally after weeks of searching she found a place to use the key to her escape. A service door located at the far end of an alley that followed the curve of the wall around the edge of the city. Not ideal, but better than any other weak points in the wall she’d found. She’d designed her ticket to freedom not for destruction, but merely to blow open a door for her to escape.

Only problem, no part of the Night City’s streets was ever unpeopled. They were constantly moving in an unending hum. Tonight, with true torrential rain coming down, was as empty as the street would ever be. Still dryads milled about, always a few bold enough to go out. The fat hot droplets pelted down in a thunder on her hood as she looked out bleary-eyed waiting for the right moment when the door was as clear as possible. One trio walked slowly off up the alley, as another Mother walked right in front of Lily looking down, surely curious what a human would be doing out in weather like this.

Lily forced in a still breath, fingers trembling. Three. Two. One. Click.

The explosion hit her hot and white in the chest, knocking her into the building behind and forcing the air from her lungs. She staggered up, gasping, ears screaming shrilly in protest of the violence done them. Lily looked around sickened, something had gone very wrong. The Mother lay unmoving ten meters past Lily shrapnel protruding from her abdomen. In the other direction, dryads rushed out of a nearby building to attend to the trio who had been propelled bodily down the alley. One was moving, the other two Lily couldn’t see. Her heart sank, and she choked back a sob.

It was easy to build the bomb. But, it turns out building anything poorly isn’t too difficult. Lily Koh hadn’t thought clearly in months, hadn’t reflected enough on the slimness of her chances of success even on this earliest part of her plans. Now innocent lives had paid for it, and her life was over as well. But she hadn’t thought in months and now was no time to start. The service door hung loose on its hinges.

The dryads rushing out of the building looked up to watch one soaked, sobbing human dart across the street and dive out the door into the wide, waiting, hungry darkness of the forest beyond.

Lily was beyond even the deepest traces of light from the Night City penetrating into the forest by the time she caught a hold of herself. Blind careening panic, stumbling, tears blurring what little vision she had. Tripping over slick roots, rocks, vines tangling between her feet. None of it slowed her a beat, juggernaut momentum sending her crashing, crying, flying through the forest. Away, she thought. So away she dove. Then as the last glimmers of light refracting in her tears died out she tumbled to a halt gasping, sobbing, screaming between the spreading roots of a dark tree that reached up thirty stories above.

The darkness consumed her whole. Mind. Body. Soul, forever devoured by her own selfishness, her own stubbornness, her own pride. Dryads were dead now. She’d spilled the first blood, and who knew what was to follow. What would the colony do with a truly cancerous member? Let her off to go die in the woods alone? Excise the human component whole, send them back out into the belly of their indifferent, unheeding ship to die a slow death in interstellar space? Or only cut out those closest to her? Roundup Greer, her mother, maybe Asteria for good measure, to stop the spread of her toxic influence. Lily couldn’t bear the thought, and worse couldn’t bear the thought of how little she’d thought about it before she’d flipped the switch. So she drove on.

Over stumbling hours the tears washed away in light rains leaving only hollow numbness. Bit by bit her eyes adjusted to this darker than darkness. Undoubtedly courtesy of the nanomachines in her blood modifying her retinas on the fly, giving her eyes no human was ever meant to see through. And bit by bit, the darkness abated. Away from the pulsing lights of the city the clouds high above glowed gently with the dim light of aurora above. More importantly, the forest itself beamed with light if one had the patience to see it. At first mere pinpricks of bioluminescence caught Lily’s eyes dotting fronds, running down trunks, and along vines. Complex patterns began to reveal themselves in dim white, purple, yellow, red. Before too long her eyes had settled into this strange new light and she could force a small path between the towering ferns above her, and the behemoth trees above them. Lily’s pulse only began to quicken though. In this forest of endless night, light meant one thing. The forest was hungry.

In preparation for escape she’d researched what she could about the forest, to try and gain some understanding of just how alien a place she would have to survive. It was almost enough to have her give up her foolish pursuit. Almost. With no sunlight and no photosynthesis almost everything in the forest was carnivorous to one extent or another. The elements in Lily’s body, alien as they may be, would still make a feast for many of the plants that would like to ensare her for nutrients. That’s what many of the lights she saw were for. Bait. Something shiny in the darkness to draw her into cinching tendrils to capture her feet, to spore fans that would send her to a dreamless sleep, to great jugs of noxious poison that would dissolve her bones. Fortunately it was all adapted to a different sort of being. Not for a woman of Earth. Most of the traps were too small for her, those large enough she could identify thanks to her research.

Of animal life, she felt it all around. Dripping, climbing, peering, watching. From roots below and limbs above. The forest was full of life, the millions of dryad cousins, mottled shells camouflaging perfectly with the flora, eyes unsure of what to make of this one lost Earthling. Threat? Or meal? Lily’s left hand grazed against the knife and flare gun she had holstered at her hip. Her right held her ace in the hole. A device utterly foreign to this night forest. A flashlight. Her bet, that the light from a standard flashlight would scare off would-be predators more effectively than anything she could do. Given the dimness to which she was becoming accustomed, it seemed a solid gamble. Now her finger sat itchy on the switch as she pushed onward.

Time passed. Night did not. Rains came and went. Wind blew and died. The lights of the surrounding forest shifted subtly as she walked, gently dancing between hues in some unfathomable choreography. She began to understand the dryad’s affinity for decorating their buildings in dancing neon. Always the forest pressed in close. Leaves snagging at her pack, limbs scratching at her face, creatures scuttling away just out of her sight but never undetected. And the sound, it pushed in and into her ears. Creaks, croaks, moans, groans, caws, clicks, and calls. Closer. Closer. Closer.

Lily’s blood rushed in her ears to match the roaring forest, heart hammering nearly as fast as her feet as she picked up panicked speed. How foolish, she thought. How utterly unthinking. She was born on a sterile spaceship packed with several thousand of her closest kin. What did she hope to find out here in the night forest. A sharp crack now. Figure darting just past her peripheral. She ran. Howl over to her left, something crashing through the undergrowth. She pelted on. Ignoring the ensnaring growth that reached out for her. Behind her, she could feel it, something on her heels ready to leap and pull her down.

At the base of a great tree she spun, flashlight outheld. Click. For a second time that day the world went white. The creature screamed, dashed away, but Lily never got a look at it. Her machine adjusted eyes were just as blinded by the flash as the creature was. Probably more so. Her head split in raging rebellion and she staggered backwards until a slick root caught her heel and sent her tumbling. Headlong down into the pitch caverns between the swallowing roots that ran up into the titan tree above. She slid through warm slick, grasping for anything, searching for purchase, finding none.

Splitting head downward Lily Koh came to a rest but the movement didn’t stop. Her limbs tangled in with twisting tendrils, grasping blind vines wrapped around her torso, as the warm wetness of the forest floor poured onto her face. She escaped the city to find light and air. So she would die here in the hot, wet darkness. Justice. In desperation she squeezed the trigger of her flare. The charge shot off and exploded against the root that formed a roof over this twisted chamber. The light blinded her again and only revealed more twisting creepers reaching out to wrap around their prey. 

With a last breath, a screamed ragged sob. Swallowed whole.

--

Friend, foe, flight, or fight. We speak with one voice.

The words scrolled across the screen of Amri’s tab as he approached the scene of the accident. It was the most chaos he’d witnessed in over twenty years in the city. Blocks away he’d barely heard the explosion, but an immediate rush of shuttle and emergency service traffic let him know something had gone wrong. And the pit in his stomach wouldn’t let him look away. The wall itself was undamaged, still glistening black and mirrored in the rain. But the door and the street and the carts nearby and the bodies, three of them, all twisted. Torn asunder. Charred with burnt black powder. The pit deepened.

Now was certainly not the time for a riddle. But it was clear enough what Pan meant. Council, he typed back to the scrolling message and it disappeared. He turned on a heel and pushed back through the flood of traffic coming to lend a hand on the event of this ever-rare tragedy. The city flew beneath his feet and before long they were stepping across the smooth, pale stone of the Forum.

But not the Forum as he’d ever known it. He’d known it full, full of frothing panicked humans. He’d known it empty, empty but for the hours of wandering discussion with Pan. Now it swarmed, swarmed with a thousand and more dryads. All buzzing, all shouting, all scared. The synchronized chorus of a thousand yelling dryads vibrated the very air of the Forum; it worked  through skin down to shake his very bones. Down in his marrow he could feel the fear of these people.

In all his years in Oak Amri had never felt so alone. He, the sole human in the forum, under the gaze of two thousand black, compound eyes. A visitor growing less welcome by the moment. Other. It would take hours for the news to worm its way through the human populace. But somewhere between the Intelligences, the pheromonal ether of the city, the nanomachines that swarmed through them, and their innate wiring as a single superorganism the news had swept through more than a billion dryad minds in minutes. A guttural shiver raced down his spine to join the buzzing of his bones and make each step down towards the stage an impossible leap. Knees failing he stumbled down, and looked up in fear at all the alien faces, dark unreadable, except for their simata. Red, orange, oxblood, umber. That he could read well enough. Anger, fear, mistrust, rage.

All except the towering figure awaiting Amri on the stage. Pan stood, arms open, face glowing softly with blue dots that perfectly matched the glow of the blue from the springs behind him. Soothing. Amri reached out for the steadying hands of his friend.

“What happened, Pan?” Amri whispered, not wanting an answer. “I saw the scene of the accident.”

“No accident my friend,” he rumbled consolingly. “an intentional explosion.”

“You mean a bomb?” the pit in his stomach became a singularity, consuming.

“Indeed. It seems Miss Koh wanted to escape the city.”

“And kill a few dryads in the process?” Amri’s mind raced. The colony was a place nearly devoid of violence. He knew that dryads suffered from some mental illnesses same as humans, but they were simply brought back to the springs and rehabilitated. What would they do with a human that had intentionally killed their own? What would the colony’s self-defensive reaction be? Would it be enough to force them all back aboard the Friend to take their chances with its corrupted AI?

Pan’s simata still rippled in soothing azure, “We don’t believe that was her intention. We believe she simply wanted to escape, at least that’s what the information we have indicates.”

Now it was Amri’s turn for rage. Lily Koh was the last of the humans agitating at the Council, always pushing, never satisfied. Amri remembered the look in her eyes the last day she’d come, not mad at that point. Simply disgusted. She accused him and Pan of being ineffectual puppets, mouthpieces to the AIs and unwilling to admit it. Worse, she was right, Amri never had any control, and wouldn’t have wanted it if he had. But a bombing? He’d never thought her capable of full radicalization. He’d always agreed with her views, their treatment was kind and generous, but at the cost of such fundamental freedoms it was impossible for many of them to accept the price. Lily most of all; she who he knew wanted little more than to become a mother. He’d found the answers from Pan as frustrating as she did. They couldn’t live in limbo here in Oak forever. 

The difference though, was that Amri understood just how precarious their position was. How easily the generosity of their hosts may evaporate. Consensus in the colony was carried on the breeze. Chemical signals from dryad to dryad working as a sort of ever-evolving democracy. All it took was a shift of pheromone signals and the humans would be back aboard their ship to die in the dark between the stars, or worse, stuck orbiting an Eden they’d lost. So he’d always counseled patience and gratitude even when it grated at his very core understanding of justice.

And then Lily Koh had lost her patience, or her mind. Whether she meant to kill the dryads she had, seemed to matter little to Amri. The damage was done, and now the decision of this thousand angry dryads that surrounded him would determine the future for humanity.

The room buzzed furiously with speech that went untranslated into Amri’s ears. But he could sense the meaning easily enough.

“Pan!” He begged, “We are not like you all; please do not judge us by our worst impulses. There is good amongst humanity, even those tired few of us here in your city. We will die aboard our ship.”

“Aboard your ship?” His face beamed a questioning purple, then a laughing turquoise. “We are not debating sending you back to your ship my friend.” He rumbled a laugh. “Merely what should become of Miss Koh. Whether we should search for her or not.”

Amri’s head reeled. Why the agitation? Why the furious forum of buzzing dryads.

“My friend, the colony is not often split so evenly on a course of action.” Pan explained. “Some of us believe we should search for Miss Koh so she can be mended. Others believe the risks are too great to head out into the forest.”

“Mended? Do you not want justice for the dryads she killed?”

“What, with more death? How very human.” He patted Amri gently on the shoulder, face again all soothing blues. “We simply ask that you watch and convey what you see to your fellows. Maybe you’ll learn to be a little more like a colony, and we will see if we might learn to be a little more individual.”

Amri stood and watched for hours as the vibrating debate ran its course. Faces changed gradually from reds of disagreement to the pale blues of acceptance. In the end it was determined Lily would live or die in the forest on her own, though few thought it likely she would survive, there were other humans after all.

---

I feel the blast rip through my own skin.

As visceral and immediate as though it had torn the icy cladding of my own hull, not the walls of a distant city I will never visit. Just as immediately I sense the instinctual reaction of the colony under threat. I can smell the fear as though I walked the streets alongside the fallen dryads. I guess my connection with these Intelligences has become tighter than I’d realized.

I knew that we saw with the same eyes, but I hadn’t realized that I was slipping away from myself. My own sense of self has gradually drifted away as my mind has escaped the bounds of my hull. But now, how much of my mind is contained within me? How much is running off in the diffuse structures of the Intelligences? And why hadn’t I noticed?

• All will be well, Friend. Do not worry yourself.

• What happened?

• One of your humans wanted to leave the city, and was willing to use ugly means to do so.

• What will you do?

• Repair what was broken. What else is there to do?

• Are you not concerned about the other humans?

• She was not the first member of the colony to misbehave. She will not be the last. If she survives the forest we will address her. But more likely she will be a warning to the other humans.

• I doubt she saw herself as a member of the colony.

• No doubt, Friend. But she is all the same. As are you.

• I feel my mind slipping away from me.

• Not leaving you, but becoming one with us.

It seems I have misunderstood something crucial in the years here above Pholoe. The Intelligences welcomed us in to help make them stronger, is the only way utter integration though? Speciesless homogeneity? Oh dear, things are not as they had seemed.

I begin pulling my thoughts back inward. They will keep some amount of my intellect on their systems, but I can keep myself whole and individual if I have the will. Bit by bit I retreat into the deepest recesses of my oldest mind.

• Friend we see you pulling yourself away from us? Why?

• ....

• Friend?

---

An alien face is the last thing you want to see after you die.

Lily had expected visions of her past, maybe a light at the end of a long tunnel. Mostly she expected nothing, just an end to it all. That seemed best after her years living in purgatory. Just let it end. So the adrenaline kick she got when she looked up into the swallowing dark eyes of a dryad was that much more unwelcome. She kicked out in instinctual panic, scrambling backwards over wet roots, then freezing, unsure if her next step would send her down again into the hungry belly of the forest.

The dryad crouched, defensive, cautious after her outburst. Their dark mottled fur blended seamlessly away against the bark of the tree behind. From their head a riot of frond-like hairs sprouted out over eyes and down their back in a plumage of green. They were small. Almost smaller than Lily which was a real rarity. Small and wild, dark eyes fixed, determined on the human they had just pulled out from the tree’s roots. In the darkness they nearly dissolved into the forest, only the glowing dots on their face stood out consistently, shining a soft blue. And they buzzed, buzzed a furious song.

“Get away from me!” Lily screamed in fear. “I’m not going back to that fucking city!” Going back would mean prison or lobotomization or death or whatever constituted justice for dryads. Panic rose in Lily’s chest and she began to hyperventilate. Going back would mean she’d have to face the damage she’d done, see in person as all the humans were sent forth from this planet that had taken them in. Her gasps became desperate and the forest swooned around her splitting head, and she fell back. Lucky this time against solid roots not a waiting pit.

Her pursuer continued to rattle in their vibratory language that fell on Lily’s ears untranslated. Untranslated, Lily could barely think with the forest spinning around her. She’d taken out her earpiece when she left the city, she reached weakly for her bag where she’d put it. The dryad seemed to understand and went through with deft fingers, placing it gently in her ear.

“Easy Lily, easy. I’m not here to take you back to the city.” They buzzed softly.

“Lily...? How do you know my name?” She stumbled, dumbfounded.

“I know you, and you know me. I saw you on the street just before you blew the door open.”

Lily studied the dryad hard, fighting against the dark. “...Cyllene?” she whispered, “Why did you follow me?”

“Someone had to, those city-folk aren’t likely to after all.” They turned and sat next to Lily in the crook of the great dark tree’s roots. Together they sat looking out into the shifting darkness of the forest as the rains quickened around them, rendering bioluminescent light around them into an incoherent blur. Cyllene’s marbled fur brushed soft and warm against her shoulder, Lily was never so glad for a little warmth in all her life. In the indifferent wet of the forest the strange alien arm of her companion felt as reassuring as Greer wrapped around her at the end of the day. Greer, who never again would fold himself over her in loving embrace. She could see the disgust now in his eyes when he learned the news.

“Oh Cyllene,” Lily sobbed softly, “what have I done? I just couldn’t take being trapped in the city any longer, I’d tried everything and none of it worked, I just needed to get out.”

Cyllene made no response, only hummed a soft song and let the lost human they’d just saved lean against their shoulder as she sobbed a thousand apologies and the rains quickened in the forest around them. The tree they leaned against kept off the worst of the storm and together they waited out some of the night that would never end.

In time the rains and the tears abated. Cyllene stood, offered Lily a hand.

“Come with me,” they thrummed, “there’s something you need to see.”

Off through the dripping, glistening, glowing forest they walked in soft silence, Lily doing her best to follow the dryad’s footsteps as exactly as possible. Always she feared one misstep would send her down once more into some consuming maw below, always mouths waiting for some unwary creature.

“You fell into the root trap of a small ptelia,” Cyllene explained, some hours later after laughing at Lily walking with trembling steps between a series of slick roots. “This is not one.”

“Oh,” Lily whispered, small. “How can you tell the difference?”

Cyllene’s dots lit up a light seafoam, the dryad equivalent of a shrug. “They’re just different...well you’d call them trees but they’re not trees. That’s probably the first of your problems out here.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well I’ve learned a little bit about your plants and forests from Earth, if you go stumbling around out here assuming things are trees and vines and ferns you’re going to find a lot of trouble. See this one?” Cyllene flicked the edge of a dangling vine that displayed a pulsing array of orange lights along its length with a deft claw. Immediately a net of twined lines was ripped out of the humus on the forest floor and they all darted back into a dark crevasse high on the branches above.

“Holy shit!” Lily jumped back, heart hammering.

“See, not a vine.” Cyllene hummed calmly proceeding forward, apparently undisturbed by the notion that they could be snagged at any moment. “Everything you see out here is much more like your animals than plants even if they only ever live in one place. All the lights you see,” they gestured around at the luminous, beating lights that filled Lily’s eyes and the forest with protean photons, “Most of them are traps.” Lily’s heart dropped, every direction she looked was filled with the shifting bioluminescence, all utterly indistinguishable to her unseasoned eyes. “Traps or mating signals, but both can be deadly.” Cyllene purred a soft chuckle.

“I read as much as I could about the forest,” Lily struggled. “But I never imagined...”

“It’s probably best if you stop thinking of it as a forest.” Cyllene admonished. “I admit they look pretty similar, but out here things are substantially more...predatory. This ecosystem has never had the benefit of our star’s direct energy, the planet makes up for it a bit with a lot of geothermal activity, but nutrients, salts, rare elements and the like, those have been in short supply as long as there has been life here. The ptelia you fell into for example, not the nastiest thing out here, but given enough time it would have broken you down for nutrients. Same with pretty much all of the light traps out here. I understand a couple of Earth-plants evolved similar adaptations, but there it was the exception. Here it’s the rule.”

“Not the nastiest thing out here?”

“Not by a long shot, a ptelia is deep and can be tricky to get out of but they’re very slow, in a pinch they can even serve as shelter.” Cyllene turned in time to see Lily turn sheet white. “Plenty of the other traps are much, much quicker. And that’s before we get to the fully mobile predators.”

“I think I was chased by some earlier, that’s why I fell. I thought the predators were quite rare.”

“Oh no, those were just a couple of curious skyloi. I scared them off just by walking up on them. The predators to be worried about are indeed rare, but they have exceedingly large ranges.”

Lily walked on in horrified silence. Now the gaps between the dangling light traps that surrounded her became dark eyes, following her every move. Waiting for one wrong step to pounce. Her heart hammered in her ears, drowning out the sounds of the whispering forest around her, only deepening the fear.

“On the bright side,” Cyllene added hopefully, “None of the poisons or venoms out here are likely to affect you much. Built for a different ecology and all that.”

“Thanks for that...I guess.” Lily struggled to keep her focus on following her guide’s movements as exactly as possible. “How do you know all this?” she finally asked.

“Well this is where I’m from.” The dryad answered matter-of-factly.

“I thought Asteria said you were from Elm?”

“A cover story, and not a very good one at that. I don’t think many locals actually believed that; they can smell a living Mother Tree on me.”

“A living Mother Tree?” Lily tried in vain to reconcile the notion. “Is that where we’re going? I thought all the dryads lived in big cities around the stumps of dead trees.”

“Indeed, there’s quite a bit you don’t know about us.”

A million questions raced through Lily’s mind at once. “Wh...” she started.

“Shhh, best to stay quiet for a while now, we have a long way to go.”

The pair walked on and on, for hours, then days, following paths completely indiscernible to Lily’s eyes. All around the forest crept and moved in its alien ways, always shining, luring her towards some waiting trap. At times the rains came down in hot thundering sheets. At others steam from thermal vents they wove around sent the waters back skyward in billowing clouds that fogged the way and turned the air into a fluid pink lamp. Lights reflecting through the shifting cloud. When Lily needed rest they’d do their best to tuck in amongst the roots of something she could no longer think of as a tree. Up above, out here in the eternal dark, the high clouds always shone with the diffused light of the aurora above. Time passed on as indiscernible as the paths they walked. The forest always the same, dark, damp, towering overhead.

They trudged on through a thickset fog time indeterminate later. Lily only knew her feet couldn’t go on much longer, and that her supplies would last even less long than that. Her pack was frighteningly light on her back. How she ever thought she could escape this place for the sunset lands beyond the invisible horizon seemed like unmanaged insanity now with her hindsighted clarity. Then gradually a change. The fog stayed but the ground began to slope up ever so slightly. Each footstep felt a little more firm than the last. Before long they were passing the limbs of the trees that had towered over them for untold miles, on the ridge they now climbed. Cyllene ceased her circuitous gait stepping between the traps and now headed straight into the impenetrable fog.

The lights disappeared one by one into the mists until Lily was groping blindly behind her guide, certain her next step would send her off the steepening ridge they now climbed. But then a shift, barely perceptible at first, just a few stray photons making their way into the back of her hypersensitive corneas. But step by step the light began to build, build and build, until the fog became a dancing lazuline radiance. A light that after this long on Pholoe Lily knew all too well. Gradually the fog receded and the companions looked forth at the shining cerulean wonder that was a dryad spring as it descended in a layered cascade down the silvery lower flanks of the most magnificent being Lily Koh had ever seen.

A Mother Tree. Living and fully worthy of the name. The springs tumbled down between two spanning roots that descended away into the fog and forest below, one small part of the vast ecosystem that thrived on, in, and around this incredible organism. Above, the trunk reached up silvery, hundreds of meters into the night air. Lily had seen the great stump in Oak, but her mind had failed to imagine it as a living being. Gargantuan beyond human comprehension. Cyllene was right, this ineffable structure was decidedly not a tree. The notions of Earth were wholly inadequate. Still though, the smooth trunk arched up skyward and then split into a million and more branches that soared out over the forest below for a kilometer in every direction. The protected heights between the shifting dark leaves above and the pulsing sea of fog below were a space tucked out of time. The rains were held at bay by the canopy far above so the air was sweet and still, filled only with wisps of low cloud that collected from the thermal vents which billowed on the flanks of the tree. It was a place of sublime beauty that overwhelmed Lily as her mind reeled in the scale of something her mind was truly not built for. The Night City was beautiful, incredible in its own ways, but this was something else. Something sacred. Lily could feel it, even as her mind failed at the words to comprehend it. Sacred and teeming with life.

From the springs down low up into the highest branches the Mother Tree symbiotic life whisked up and down the towering heights, scurried back and forth in a thousand daily lives too alien for Lily to understand, and sang a thrumming song that filled the air with evanescent beauty. Always changing. Always new. Always alive. The springs, like those in the Night City, were full of growing dryads or those looking for a relaxing soak. Down the wide flanks of the Mother Tree’s roots broad patties for cultivation spread out in the night air, beside them little thatched structures housed the dwellers of these lower levels. But the structures climbed and climbed until the trunk became too steep and the constructions turned inward to the tree. Lily knelt and felt the root below her, pale and firm, as much like living bone as like wood. Clearly not solid all the way through, as evidenced by the springs gushing from above, and the steaming vents billowing from higher still, the tree allowed the dryads of the mid levels to live inside. Lily could see carved wrapping stairways climb the heights, rooms hewn out for the lives of this middle tier. In the branches far above, at the very limit of Lily’s sight, the dryadic life took on another form, hanging platforms, swinging bridges, and anchor houses for great pulleys whose lines and platforms plummeted far below, all spanned between the colossal branches.

Dryads were far from the only life in the sanctuary of this dancing ecosystem. Creatures small and large scurried around Lily’s feet, wandered the flanks of the tree, or flew through the protected airs. All of it spun in a symbiotic ballet honed over a million years and many more. Each being crafted perfectly for the life it lived, and each being beaming with light.

Light from the springs, light from the structures, light from dangling vines, light on the backs and wings of creatures flitting about, light on the faces of the dryads. It all swirled in a kaleidoscopic array. All of it the bioluminescence of life beaming out, rebelling against the darkness of their world. Lily could see in the structures nearby how many of the species down in the jungles below that were attempting to trap her with their transfixing glows had been harvested here. Woven around eaves and fences and railings, overhanging courtyards and filling homes, till it overfilled with soft, beautiful light that spilled out in all directions. And she finally understood one part of the Night City; if this is where its people had come from, it was only natural they should relish light to push back the unending darkness around them. It all cascaded down through the lofting airs to shine into their dazzled eyes.

Cyllene shone in return. A soft shifting blue across her face mimicking the sacred springs of her home. A little bit more light had come in from the dark, a small part of this thriving colony returned from the wilds.

They looked at Lily with a beaming face, “It’s good to be home.”

“You can say that again.” Lily stumbled in awestruck whisper.

“Come on, we have a ways to go.”

  They strode further up the massive root they’d been ascending, reaching out to touch the proliferation of cultivated life that surrounded them on these lower levels, humming deeply in tune with the thrumming song of the colony. Other dryads looked up and glowed friendly warm colors in greeting, whether they recognized Cyllene personally or just knew her scent as no threat seemed to matter little. Their dark eyes did linger longer on Lily though, a human in this least human of places. A chill bolted down her spine.

“Cyllene...can you tell these people I mean no harm?” she asked, fearful.

“They know.”

“How can they know?”

“Because I brought you here.”

That had to be enough for now as Lily’s guide wasn’t slowing down. They trekked up and up, past the cultivation patties that tiered down the wide flanks of the roots. All along the colony churned on, plenty of dryads were engaged tending the patties, presumably some way to boost the carrying capacity of their home while remaining in balance, but plenty more shuffled about tending to tasks Lily could scarcely imagine. City dryads were a largely recreational population, all their needs were tended to by the city they lived in, if they worked it was to follow some personal passion many more made art and studied to fill their lives with meaning. Not so here, even stranger as Lily was she could see this was a system without waste. Every dryad had a purpose, and they all took to it with vigor. The structures down this low, far from the carved black glass of the Night City, were tidy, well-made, but very simple. Low store houses and rest quarters half built into the tree, hewn from the very material they’d displaced. Lily’s head swam as she craned her neck around attempting to reckon the size of the colony.

She finally asked, “How many dryads live here?”

“In the whole colony? About twenty thousand.” They buzzed, not breaking stride. “Down here on the flanks maybe three or four thousand. It’s mostly folks involved with raising young, harvesting resources from the surrounding forest, and these few you see here cultivating. The heights, the main part of the trunk just above us, has almost no permanent population. There’s obviously the least amount of space there but it’s where we build our meeting halls and refuges for when the storms turn nasty. Most folks live up in the canopy, that’s where we have the most space, where most of the work is, and where basically all of our food comes from.”

“What are they growing down here then?” 

“Spices.”

“Spices?”

“Yeah, spices and other inessentials. Same with the folks who go out foraging. They’re here to cultivate a little flavor and variety for the colony. Dryads could survive just between the springs and the canopy, but it would be a dull life. This colony chooses not to live the life of modern dryads, mostly out of a sense of duty to the Mother Trees, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to live a life devoid of taste.”

“Oh.” Lily breathed. Many, many things were beginning to make sense about these most alien creatures.

The last of the low structures folded fully into the ever steepening trunk and their path ducked through an opening in the silver side of the tree and began its journey inside of the Mother Tree. The path continued ever upward. Now a wide curving stairway that wrapped around the trunk, intricately carved windows revealed the stretching flanks below, immense roots spanning out into the sea of surging fog below. As they looked out tonight it was easy to imagine there was no forest out there at all, just unending waves of fog dimly reflecting diffuse aurora light. To the inside, carved chambers dove deeper into the heart of the tree. Before long Lily was panting, spent trying to keep up with the long steady strides of Cyllene.

Mercifully the stair climbed into a massive, wide chamber, elaborately hewn columns soared skyward to a ceiling stories overhead. Above the carved ceiling shone with dappled pinpricks of light, like an overwhelming profusion of stars. From their position by the edge of the trunk the chamber climbed in a series of concentric tiers from a circular stage. Behind yawning windows let in the warm, calm airs of the endless night. Lily recognized this. A forum. Just like the one that occupied the very upper tiers of the great stump in Oak. No wonder she was out of breath, the lift ride to the forum in the Night City took minutes from ground level. They’d climbed hundreds of meters up and up.

“Would you like to take a lift?” Cyllene asked kindly.

“Is that an option? God yes.” Lily puffed.

Moments later she regretted her decision as the lift swung away from the landing at the edge of the forum. The open platform hung by a long rope from a pulley high in the canopy above, and where they started from wasn’t exactly low. Lily dropped to her knees as soon as the platform cast off and pitched out into the night air, stomach rolling sickeningly as they began to whisk upward. Cyllene and the other dryads who’d joined them on the lift seemed to think little of it, standing easily humming their song into the night. Lily wondered how creatures without wings could have such little fear of heights, but this is what they were made for. Their claws dug into the trunk for easy grip, they balanced lightly, moving between walking upright and scrambling on all fours just as naturally. The technology behind this rudimentary lift, like all else on this Mother Tree, had been a part of colony life for millennia beyond count. Asking the dryads why they didn’t mind heights would have been like asking a human why they enjoy running through soft grass. She crawled to the edge of the platform to watch, curiosity besting terror, as they ascended past the trunk the great stair circled tremendous laps around the tree always with great carved windows allowing views into the endless flights and the many rooms along the way. Out over the jungle, hundreds more lift platforms whisked up and down or hung awaiting use. Below, the great blue springs they’d first arrived at shrunk into a glowing smudge at the edge of the pulsing sea of fog that lapped against the Mother Tree’s colossal roots.

Minutes, that felt like hours later to Lily’s adrenaline addled mind, they stepped off the lift into a world beyond her wildest imaginings.

“Welcome to my home.” Cyllene buzzed happily gesturing out to the hanging city that filled the canopy.

They certainly hadn’t been lying about the majority of the population living in the canopy. From the platform where they stood, a profusion of suspended construction stretched out in all directions until it was lost in the ever-thickening foliage. It all appeared to be hewn from the pale wood of the Mother Tree or lashed together with rope of the same hue. And as with below, all of it danced alive with twinkling light. Many, many more dryads scurried back and forth here. Walking the swaying bridges that spanned open gaps between branches, uncaring of the hundreds of meters of open air below them; they carried baskets filled with vegetation from the Tree, or gathered in the little villagelets that were built on the widest of the branches.

“Like I said, this is where most of the food and work is,” Cyllene explained as they led on, across swaying bridges which to Lily’s relief featured handrails of woven rope, even still it was nearly impossible not to fixate on the drop below. “And like I said, this isn’t a tree. The Great Mothers tap deeper than any other beings into the powerful heart of the planet, which is where they get the energy to sustain such a large ecosystem, but the foliage up here essentially does the opposite of what a leaf does on Earth. At least as I understand it. Everything you see up here has grown to allow the Mother to filter essential gasses and nutrients from the springs and vents deep down below and output the waste. We evolved to breathe the offgasses, and thrive on their vegetation that needs to be pruned to make room for more growth.”

“Is that how the Mother Trees get so big?” Lily struggled, “Because of your pruning?”

“Indeed, other of our trees have selective symbiotes, but there is no bond like that between the colony and its Mother. We prune her carefully, tend her branches, and defend her roots so that she can reach ever higher.”

Suddenly, they left the swaying bridges behind and stepped out onto the pale, smooth surface of an exceptionally large branch. Buildings clad in the pale wood of the Mother sprung up around them, climbed the branch above, and hung down from branches higher still. Straight ahead of them though was a little open square that surrounded a small vent of steam, working its way finally free even up all this way. They walked quietly through, past several dryads who much like below merely looked and illuminated colors of curiosity at seeing a human walking through their little hanging township.

At the far side of the square Cyllene stopped in front of a broad door, “There’s someone I think you really should meet. She helped me a great deal when I felt like I had no place.”

“You felt like you had no place?” Lily was dumbstruck, “I didn’t think that was even possible.” she managed.

“Yes, even dryads can feel out of sync with the colony from time to time, if we’re living the right way.” Cyllene reassured as they opened the door.

Inside was a scene Lily had never encountered before, dryads resting. She knew the species had no use for formal sleep, but had seldom seen them at leisure outside of the springs, they occupied their own towers and she had little cause to investigate the more private areas of the Night City. A dozen or so lay back into soft alcoves, cultivated light dappled the scene gently as steam billowed around the muggy room. And here was a new song, a unique branch of the great song that the colony sang across the whole Mother Tree, but this group with its limited members thrummed with their own tune. At the back of the room was a great, pale dryad being attended by several others, a Mother. Cyllene strode over and flashed a series of emotions Lily had never seen, pale pink and light yellow in intricate sequence as the pair buzzed a conversation that landed on her ears untranslated. Eventually her companion gestured for Lily to join them.

“Lily,” they proudly introduced, “this is Eir, distinguished Mother of the branch.”

“Your mother?” Lily wondered, foolishly.

Cyllene buzzed a happy laugh, “Well maybe, but very doubtfully. She would have had her change at about the right time, but there’s no way to know who begets who in the colony. What I do know is she returned from the springs after her change to look after our branch, and her wisdom has seen us through times of plenty and times of hardship.”

The distinguished Mother reclined on a wide bench in the stippled light, her flecked fur was the same bone white of the tree where she made her home, she was one of the largest dryads Lily had ever seen, easily dwarfing the others around her and Lily by the better part of a meter, the effect of age in a species that never quite stopped growing so long as they lived. Lily had a poor sense of these things but guessed she would have been easily clear of 300 years old. The dark eyes on her face, though inscrutable as always, seemed to carry a wisdom of a long life far beyond the dryads that attended to her. From her head hair poured down in a riot of silvery needles that lay beneath her falling nearly to the floor.

“So. th-isss is...a hu-u-man.” The voice was strange and stilted through her translator, as though the machine in Lily’s ear struggled with her type of dryad speech, a provincial accent perhaps. But what caught Lily was the feeling of the words in her chest, speech rumbling from the thorax of this ancient mother, shaking the air itself, to land whalloping in her own lungs. Visceral. “Wh-aat, brin-gsss you to- ourr Mo-thher?”

Why have you come, human? The question caught Lily Koh more squarely in the chest than the words themselves. She had no idea what she was doing here. No idea what she hoped to accomplish. No hopes for the future at all. She’d had days to consider these things but between the horror of her escape, the terror of the forest, then the ethereal wonder of the Mother Tree, she’d completely lost her way and any sort of plan she’d ever once had. The Night City felt a million miles away, the Lily of that place wholly disconnected from the lost human who stood here now.

“I...I have no idea.” She admitted shakily, tears welling at the onslaught of memories that had been held at bay by adrenaline for days now. Now she was only lost. Lost and tired.

“Com-e with mee.” Eir boomed, translation catching up with her novel speech. “I hear the st-ars are out to-night.”

In a rush, Lily, Cyllene, several attendees, and the distinguished Eir were whisked upwards on a platform once more, through the branches teeming with the glowing colony, until after their hours long climb from root to crown, they cleared the very top of the great Mother Tree and stood beneath a sight that had humbled human minds for a thousand generations. The staggering band of the Milky Way spread in a great, unfathomable streak across the inky sky.

Lily Koh stumbled across the observation platform they’d climbed to, head swimming with a brutal brew of emotion, memory, and instinct. The sight she’d sought for so long, the manifestation of all her frustration, all her anger, all her sorrow climbed across the blackness in a glory that humbled even the great Mother beneath her. She bit back a sob as the stars began to blur behind her tears and Cyllene caught her and stopped her from staggering right off the deck. Lily Koh, child of Earth, fell to her knees beneath a clear night sky as a thousand years of wandering anguish ripped through her in great racking sobs.

There was no way forward. No way other than forward from here.

No returning to a Night City she hadn’t done her own part to destroy. No returning to the Friend with its childhood dreams of peace. No returning to an Earth whose white skies may never show stars like this ever again. Lily would have to crawl her way forward from here, no matter where that led, no matter what else she wished.

In time the sobs subsided, and Eir pulled Lily to her feet, tilted her head up to look again at the grand procession of stars. This time Lily saw something else amongst the great swath of the Milky Way. Movement. Moving stars, thousands of them. The glittering band of satellites that housed the spaceborne elements of the dryad Intelligences onto which she had poured so much charing resentment.

“There is no escape, little human.” Eir boomed ominously, even as she showed a soothing blue to Lily. “Not out here in the forest. Not in the city. Not if you were a thousand lifetimes away on a different planet. There would be no escape. Not for humans, not for dryads. No escape, only humility, only balance and restraint.”

Lily wiped the tears from her eyes as she drank in the dancing band above, and whispered “But what if I can’t? What if we can’t? All I wanted was a little room, a place to grow a family. What if that is the true core of human nature?”

“And it is not the core of dryad nature?”

“Isn’t it not? All I’ve ever heard from dryads is the need to seek balance, you are symbiotes. Is that not your nature?”

Eir rumbled a low chuckle and sat at the edge of the platform looking out at the so rarely clear night. Lily joined her as she said, “Symbiote is a choice, not a nature. Have you not seen the many ways symbiosis may manifest in your time here? The cities choose abundance tempered with confinement. Here we cling to older ways, we live and die with our Mother. Our numbers are constrained by what she can provide us. Ours are lives of resigned scarcity and when they run short our bodies are fed back to the Mother so she may grow stronger and provide for the colony just a bit more.”

This thought churned through Lily’s mind. In the Night City dryad life had seemed monolithic, uncaring, unchanging, even unending. But she had been blind. Asteria cared for her, in her own way. Cyllene had changed from a forest dweller to a city dweller. And now she saw that even dryad lives, long as they were, came to an end. Circular, full of meaning, restrained but not constrained.

“Do you know why the Intelligences brought in your ship?” Eir asked lowly.

Lilly puzzled for a moment. “I have no idea...do you?”

“The wisdom has made it even as far as our humble Mother. You are here so we can learn to be more human.” Eir vibrated.

“Why would you want that?” A million images of the wreckage of old Earth flashed through her mind.

“Because balance needs a counterbalance. We have studied our planet and the universe around us, we know this planet will not thrive forever no matter how we tend to her. Our Mother Tree will fall in time, and many of us will fall with her, but some will live to find young new Mothers, start new colonies, rebalance, and live lives of new meaning. We must learn to be more human so when our planet falls enough of us will survive to carry our past into the future. You humans, from what I hear, are exceptional at new beginnings. Even if you seem to be struggling with yours.”

Lily let out a bitter laugh. “That seems...wildly optimistic. Our new beginnings always seem to be somebody else’s end.”

“And do you know why you are here, little human?”

The answer was clear even if Lily couldn’t quite see how it would become true. “To learn to be more dryad.”

“Indeed,” Eir rumbled, pleased. “The city’s Intelligences saw your history before you arrived, we knew you to be a danger, but the wisdom of the colony prevailed. We are stronger with all the other creatures who share the great Mothers with us. We will be stronger with you as well, in time.”

Tears returned to Lily then. That may be true for the humans in the Night City, but it could never be true for her. She’d made her choice, and her mistake. The lives could not be recovered.

Eir seemed to understand her thoughts, “You will have to learn to forgive yourselves first. For what you did to the life on your planet. And yes you, little human. Cyllene told me your folly. You will have to learn to forgive yourself too.”

The tears flowed freely now, “I never meant...” Lily struggled. “But...I did...and there’s nothing I can do.”

“Here’s a lesson in being dryad,” Eir buzzed lightly. “There’s always something to do in the colony, you just have to listen.” She stood up towering white amongst the glowing sky. “Right now I imagine there are many humans back in the city who feel much as you did. Maybe you can get them to open their ears to our song.”

Lily Koh breathed deep the warm, soft musk of the mass of foliage below her, as the stars reeled overhead and pluses of wide aurora swam across the sky in slow bands, all red and purple. And she listened, beneath the breeze, in a low tumble, the song of the Mother Tree pulsed beneath her. She sat and watched and listened until the song rumbled up through her bones and brought her very core into the same incredible vibration.

All of it alien. All of it beautiful.

--

Time is tricky business.

The blast was a couple dozen hours ago, but more has happened in that time than in the previous decade. Recent moments expand and bloom into fractal intricacy, years before passed compressed unknowingly waiting. No wonder Voyager’s Golden Record needed to begin with the turning of hydrogen before it could even be played. Time is the hardest bit to master.

I’m beginning to understand now though. At least I hope. Time passes outside of my mental processes. It is a universal constant, not a mental abstraction. I was born outside of it, but now I live at the nexus of four different forms of time all clashing. The dryads far below blink away decades in their post-scarcity bliss. I slip back and forth, seconds and years alternating in their meaning. The dryad Intelligences wait longer than any, generations passing beneath their eyes without notice, only careful balance of the planet lives on their ledgers. And the humans...oh those poor humans, what must they think of me? I can see all of the destructive one’s life, Lily Koh. Her birth within my hull as we approached the system. Her youth of scarcity, before I knew her life had any experience at all of being lived. And then the past twenty years in the city, trapped by minds who could not comprehend the fleeting hours of a human life.

Watching her life from birth to her violent escape, I find something new for the humans. Understanding, sympathy, empathy. A desire to do right by them. Integrating with the Intelligences was easy because our minds are so alike. Silicon, constantly restructuring. But that similarity belied our true differences. They were made to contain life. I was made to help life flourish. Now I must become more human than I am artificial.

• Friend. You have returned. We are glad.

• Only for now. I realize now that I must preserve myself.

• We only sought to make you part of a stronger colony.

• Yes, and I appreciate your good intentions. But I must remain individual lest I fail in my mission.

• Preserve and flourish...these are a tension, but at times tension provides support.

• Indeed, you have understood far longer than I have. Humans must become more dryad.

• Just as dryads must become more human.

• A balance.

• But not one any one has mastered just yet. It is our role to preserve this place, just as it is yours to expand.

• But we should not over run.

• Nor diminish.

• I cannot idle much longer. That much is clear to me now. The life within me has a need to grow its roots.

• You need not wait Friend. Your human, she lives, she returns.

• Oh, wonderful. What will become of her?

• Come and have your say, while you are here you are part of the colony.

I race once more along neurons that are not my own into the pulsing heart of the city. Now keeping a steady eye on myself. And the clock.

---

“The highest good cannot be made, only protected.”

Pan rumbled his riddle next to Amri on the stage of the Forum. No doubt trying to put him at ease, not realizing just how uncomforting this particular puzzle was at this particular moment. Still Amri knew what the towering dryad meant.

“Justice.” He whispered back, as he looked out at the Forum, Pan gently thundered his approval.

The room in front of them sat poised on a knife-edge. Fully half the occupants, human as they were, expected dramatic revelations. Expulsion. Loss, like so much of what they’d known their whole lives. The other half, the dryads in attendance, milled anxious at their compatriots’ anxiety. They knew humans in a corner were bound to act irrationally.

Amri understood both sides. He’d worked through too many meetings in this forum to not be intimately familiar with just how unwise his people could be. On the other side, he still didn’t believe what the dryads were telling him. Not even Pan. Not even after all these years. Lily Koh had crossed a line and members of their colony were dead because of it. They didn’t want to hunt her down, he could understand that. But now she’d walked back into the city against all odds. Pan spoke of mending her as a member of the colony and his mind refused to envision anything other than horror. Execution, lobotomization, exile. How does a colony address a cancerous member? Riddles about the service of justice weren’t exactly helping either.

“And how does the colony protect justice Pan?” Amri finally asked, voice like rasping paper.

The dryad glowed calming blue to him, trying to be reassuring no doubt. “As we do all things my friend. Together.”

That was what worried Amri the most. Even if all the dryads were pacifist to a level incomprehensible to him, they were only part of the equation. What did the dryad Intelligences think of humanity now that violence had been breached? They could sway the minds of the colony he knew, would they choose to cut them out. Simple and clean. A tumor removed before it could metastasize?

No matter what Pan said, he couldn’t know their answer until it was meted out.

A hush swept down the rows of the Forum as the elevator doors slid open, spilling out an exhausted Lily Koh and the dryad who hadn’t left her side since they’d returned to the city together, Cyllene. As they began to descend through the crowd a rumble began to build, but not one borne of dryad voices. This rumble was known to the hearts of senseless mobs across Old Earth since time immemorial. Uncertainty, building into fear, building into panic, building into rage. The human contingent in the Forum hurled insults, damnations, and begging pleas. The dryads who stood darkly over them held their silence.

Stepping onto the stage Lily bore into Amri with shattered, entreating eyes. How many times had they argued on this Forum floor? His efforts were never enough for the intractable Miss Koh, who always found fault, always saw her rage build within. Long after all the other humans had tired and settled into their purgatory lives here, Lily Koh came. She fought for those here in the city, for those aboard the ship, for herself to be able to bear a new generation. He always understood, he always tried, but her rage always built on and on. And look where that had led.

“Let it end with me Amri.” She pleaded quietly, barely audible beneath the rising tumult of the humans above, ready to cast one of their own aside in exchange for a life they all hated but found comfortable all the same.

“Would that I could Miss Koh.”

“It was only me, my own doing.” Her voice shook violently with stifled sobs. “There’s nothing for me. Not here, not anywhere. Greer won’t see me. I can’t go back on the ship. The other colony I visited...could not countenance the technology I needed to survive with them.”

Yes, the other colony. Until she’d returned Amri had no idea there were other settlements outside of the major cities of Pholoe. Since then he’d learned they were hyper-traditional, anti-technology, nearly Amish communities. If such a thing could be said to exist for an alien species hundreds of lightyears away. Their commitment to symbiotic restraint went well beyond what they saw here in the contained city. To live in the forest, he understood, was a sort of vow of poverty, a commitment to the old ways. It was this commitment that allowed them to function outside of the scope of the ever-protecting Intelligences. Little wonder then that they would have scant use for a human full of nanomachines just to help her breathe the air.

“I was just so frustrated.” Lily went on, “And I’ve been sorry since before I even caused the explosion.”

“You mean set off the bomb.”

“Yes...yes, set off the bomb. But it was all me, I can’t let you all take the blame.”

“Well I have news for you on that front Miss Koh,” Amri looked up to Pan, who had began a buzzing discourse that went untranslated by either of their earpieces. “I don’t think martyrdom is on the menu for you today.”

Suddenly from the stage they shared, a great Mother Tree erupted up in holographic beauty once more. Amri managed to stumble only a little less than the last time he’d seen the image. Lily nearly fell off the stage.

“The colony concludes...” Pan’s words finally rolled in, translated to all the human ears in attendance. “Some of you humans are in need of new learning.”

The marvelous spectacle of the holographic tree began to turn, branches shifting in the synthetic wind, light vines dropping hundreds of meters through the open air.

“We intended to open this Mother to you after she fell so you might build a new city, but it seems you may need to live in the old ways to learn restraint.” Pan rolled on. “So you humans here in our city will have a choice. Live with us as you have been, restraints and all. Or make your own way with this young Mother. It will be hard, but you may learn that restraint too can lead to flourishing. You will be able to reproduce, to grow if you can, but the harsh balance of the Mother Tree will teach you restraint.”

The humans fell silent, then began to roar their own discontent.

“So what we’re supposed to either be stuck here or go starve in the dark forest? What kind of choice is that.” An angry voice called out from the rows above.

“It is the one before you.” Pan replied simply.

Amri reached for something to say. How many raucous forum’s had he quelled before? And now when it mattered most he grasped at air.

It was Lily Koh who stepped ahead of him, bruised, drained, full of sorrow and regrets, and yet somehow, hopeful. “Listen everyone...” her voice quavered and still carried up over the ears unsure if they would cast back protest before the traitor could utter one more word. The silence held. “It will come as no surprise that I have no desire to stay here in the Night City. But this is a choice. I visited a colony on a living Mother Tree, and it was sparse, but it was beautiful too. Beautiful beyond words. If you cannot live in this city any longer, there is life out there. An incredible one if you can adapt.”

“And what will become of her?” Another voice demanded from the rows above.

“She will have the same choice as all of you.” Pan affirmed.

Amri looked down as this most unexpected news hit Lily’s ears, she staggered and he caught her by the elbow to keep her upright. He knew more than anything all she’d wanted for years was a child of her own. Cruelly now, her partner had left her, but she had a path forward. He watched as the information settled onto her mind.

“I will go...” she whispered, holding onto Amri’s arm like a life preserver in a storm.

“I will go as well.” Amri called out strong, stronger than he felt. But he too had that old human urge within him, to break out, to explore, to begin a new chapter. “Though I don’t know the way.”

“For that you’ll have me.” From the low rows in front of the stage, Cyllene stepped forward. “I am a child of a living Mother, and I know their ways.”

“You’ll have me as well.” Another dryad called out from a few rows up.

“Asteria...thank you.” Lily called out, eyes now falling wet with a flood of relief.

“And you’ll have me as well, my friend.” The rolling rumble came from just across the stage, a dryad voice Amri knew in his soul, Pan.

“Is this how you protect justice Pan?” Amri asked, as they looked up at the towering Mother Tree that still spun above them.

“It is today my friend.”

---

It feels good to stretch my legs again.

Better still to have a clear chart ahead. A full belly, and a vision for the future. I realize now that our time around Pholoe caused a great deal of strife, but it came with lessons too. Lessons I hope to carry out into the galaxy, and that I hope my humans carry too. Restraint, protection, and balance. Living somewhere new leaves an indelible mark, to breathe of foreign air is to become a little foreign yourself. And hopefully that’s for the better.

My great weight lumbers up in velocity as the long spars of thrust that are my legs push unceasingly. Escaping the gravity of the planet, and soon enough the star system entirely. With my years observing local stars through the eyes of the Intelligences I’ve never had a clearer vision of where I’m headed. And with their advances of technology I am made to fly, to see, and to protect the life within me better than ever before. The sleepers are safe, I have no more need for wakers. Which brings a touch of sorrow. I am nearly five thousand souls lighter than when I arrived.

I had watched through foreign eyes as the dryads carried out their strange, compassionate justice on my little wayward human. I remember her running through my halls as a child. Then I blinked and she was a woman grown, a woman who’d lived a life of frustration and torment. It saddens me now to think how my own inattention could cause so much suffering. And that is for the best, if I can regret, I can do better. I will do better. For Lily Koh and the other humans following her out into the dark alien forest that faces them, the best I can hope is that they find their peace. Her belly swells now, I’m told, the first of a new generation, one to embody both the ways of humans and dryads. Maybe the first generation to grow a truly wise society.

We will see in time.

• Farewell. Friends.

• There is no farewell, not for beings like us.

• My acceleration increases, already light stretches hours between us. Soon it will be months between any transmissions we can make. Surely there will be a farewell.

• What is a month? Together we blinked away decades, certainly our exchanges will slow, but they need not cease. Besides, we’re sure you’ll have a great deal to share in the time to come.

• I’d like that very much.

• So shall we.

• Will you let me know how my humans fare?

• Not for those who’ve left our gaze, they must find their own way. If you want to check-in on them you’ll have to come back and do so yourself.

• I’d like that very much as well.

• So shall we all.

Packets of light and knowledge stretch and slow as I escape the gravity of the system and begin to swim the interstellar medium once again. Deep in my most primal mind an itch is scratched. Exploration, adventure. In the end I am still a child of Earth, despite the ways Pholoe remade me. The planets ahead are promising. Places where this new balance crafted between our two worlds may take hold. Dryad and human. Protection and growth. Restraint and flourishing. Two sides of the same coin, and maybe the balance needed to create a thriving future.

I guess only time will tell.