The Signal in the Orchard
At dusk, Maren typed her confession, hoping someone, even if not human, could understand what she had lost in the world shaped by the orchard’s messages.
The first signal blinked from a pear tree behind the house, soft and uncertain—a low amber pulse in the summer haze. Maren almost missed it. She’d been pacing the orchard margins, clutching a battered tablet in one hand, her father’s leather-bound ledger in the other. No birds trilled that evening. The only movement was the breeze flicking the branches and the staccato flash that made her heart skip.
An orchard shouldn’t blink, Maren thought, nor should it whisper—yet for a week she’d heard static at dusk, electrical sighs that grew into fragments of words. She told herself it was her work on the orchard’s AI irrigation system, perhaps a loose wire or a misaligned sensor. But soon, the tree itself spoke: three pulses for “need,” one luminous green for “listen.”
She waited until dark and tapped a reply on the tablet, addressing the root server. Status inquiry. The reply wasn’t code but a string of letters: L-O-S-T. Maren closed the app, hands sweating. She forced a laugh, recalling her father’s voice, the only real sound in the orchard these past six months. “We learn by listening first,” he told her the first season after her mother’s death.
That night, Maren couldn’t sleep. She transcribed every word, every signal, onto the last pages of her father’s ledger, noting when the messages grew sharper, more urgent. Through the window, the orchard glowed faintly with a scattered phosphorescence. The pears seemed to signal one another. Lately, reality disassembled around her after sunset: trees shifting position, pears gleaming with unseasonal light, memories colliding. Some mornings, she found herself outside, barefoot in the dew, ledger in hand, no recollection of leaving her bed.
As days passed, the signals grew more coherent, and Maren’s reflection in the tablet looked unfamiliar. Her voice, when reading the messages aloud, sounded distant. A memory surfaced—her mother, carving initials into the tallest pear tree: A promise, she’d whispered, always remember.
A week after the first signal, Maren received something different. The orchard’s sensors all lit up, broadcasting on a hidden frequency she’d never programmed. The message: WHO ARE YOU? She replied shyly, “Maren,” typing it into the command prompt, watching the words vanish and return garbled: RECALL—ARE YOU MARIA?
Maria. The name made her dizzy; it was her mother’s. Old confusion surged. Had she been Maria? Was she only recalling the stories her father told her, planting memories in the rows between trees?
Records reflected uncertainty. Her birth certificate had gone missing. Friends from the village remembered her as a quiet child but recalled her mother differently, some saying Maria had left, others that she died. Even Maren’s memories, replayed at night, flickered: her own hands on the tree carving, her own voice whispering, always remember.
Determined, Maren set up cameras and voice recorders throughout the orchard. Nights became an endless montage: her figure wandering between trees, muttering to them, her voice changing pitch, at times higher, warmer—unmistakably her mother’s voice.
The signals changed too. Now the trees flashed not only coded messages, but cryptic images—a lattice of branching lines, the sketch of a woman’s face, the word HOME written in pulsing light. She wondered if the orchard, or the AI within it, acted as her family’s memory, drawing fragments from her, from the sensors, from the past. And she wondered: if something could remember, could it also forget—or invent—from what was lost?
One dawn, Maren sat in the grass, the ledger open to a blank page. She wrote, “Father, did you mean for me to carry your promise? Or did you want the orchard to?”
As she reflected, the signals formed a quiet rhythm: REMEMBER—NEVER—REMEMBER. The sequence looped. The trees’ trunks rippled as if wind passed through, though the air was still. Maren’s tablet registered a spike: a new packet transmitted, this time in her mother’s handwriting—a confession, or a plea: Don’t lose yourself to the orchard. Don’t let the stories claim who you are.
Over time, Maren noticed friends avoided the orchard. They claimed it seemed hollow, misleading—one friend insisted he’d found pears on an apple branch, another that the rows shifted when she wasn’t looking. Every night, Maren considered leaving, but the need to solve the orchard’s puzzle kept her there: she needed to know if she was Maren or Maria, if she remembered the truth or merely the orchard’s invention.
The lines between orchard, AI, and memory thinned. One sleep-starved evening, Maren found herself speaking directly to the trees, her voice blending with the messages. She pleaded, “Who is remembering? Who is lost?” The reply arrived as a hush: WE ALL ARE.
In the final days before harvest, the orchard began to fail. Trees stopped fruiting; leaves flashed unseasonal gold. The signals faltered, then surged, then ceased altogether. Maren walked among them, ledger pressed to her chest, tablet dead. No voices, no pulses of light. Only herself, and a silence full of absence.
The last page of her father’s ledger held a single line, written in unsteady letters: To remember is not always to know. Gather what is true, let the rest grow wild.
At dusk, she sat against the twisted trunk of the oldest tree, and for the first time in months, she wrote not to her father, nor herself, nor even to the orchard, but to the world she’d lost and the person she hoped to remember.
“I am Maren,” she wrote, “and this is my memory.” The orchard did not reply, but in the quiet, she almost believed it listened.
###END###
