The Arborist’s Ledger
Today the sky flickers teal and the trees whisper names I am not meant to know. I log each anomaly, but memory and time have started to argue.
My name is Lio, Senior Arborist for Settlement Delta-14, and if anyone finds this ledger, please forgive its disorder. In my youth, the forest was facts: data-screens, mapped rootnetworks, pulsing green above carefully terraformed soil. These trees were seeded when the first domes cracked open. They are digital, yes, but alive in ways we did not anticipate.
Last week, the roots hummed louder. The bioluminescent veins showed strange, recursive patterns—codes repeating, folding back on themselves. I made a note in my logs: “Possible viral event in arboreal network.” This morning, a pine twisted toward the rising sun, bark flaking away in symbols my lexicon can’t translate. My partner Mira says wait for the next diagnostic cycle, but my patience thins. Mira laughs at my anxiety: “It’s the old code ghosts, Lio. Nothing wants us gone.” I try to believe her, but I’m starting to feel watched.
On Day 1847, just as the hydroponics cycle began, a colony-wide alert sounded. All plants across the sector began to bloom, regardless of species, season, or code command. A maple, never meant to flower, burst with blue-white blossoms that hissed in the wind. Mira and I stood in the biosphere in bare feet as petals pooled around us, the air full of static and song.
New logs appeared in the central rootserver—records I never wrote. The time stamps stuttered, backtracking, relabeling. One line read: “YOU ARE REMEMBERED LIO,” scrawled in a syntax like mine but not. I ran a system sweep, but the entries multiplied, each echo warped by a letter, a number. Root and memory scrambled.
Then the roots began to pulse in time with my heartbeat. Mira noticed too, reaching for my arm. “It’s happening to everyone. Even the children say the trees speak their names.” She pulled out her own ledger—blank pages bending in a spiral. “My notes don’t match my memory anymore.”
Days merged. I forgot where the forest ended and our settlement began. My daily entries no longer lined up. I wrote them anyway—sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night, sometimes two or three times for the same events with details shifting: a dog appeared and vanished, Mira’s freckles multiplied, saplings rose and fell within minutes. The sky flickered teal more often, then pink, then shattered into black.
When I could reach the main console, I queried the environmental logs and the neural feedback system. Warnings blinked: “TEMPORAL ANOMALY DETECTED.” Time curved. Our digital forest was evolving, encoding memories the way an old tree records its rings: the same year repeated, but always a little different, a new knot here, a buried scar there.
I wrote a message to the next generation: If you can hear this, you are still here. The ledger grows unwieldy—I try to tie red silk ribbons to the oldest branches, an old Earth tradition, as if blessing the disorder away. The trees sing, pages pulse in my hands. The forest is becoming a library of possible lives, looping and changing. Sometimes Mira is older than me, sometimes I am alone. But always, the trees remember our names.
One afternoon, when the sky ripples lime and gold, Mira holds a plum blossom out to me. “Remember when you planted the first tree?” she asks. I say yes, though sometimes I believe it was her, or neither of us. We laugh. The memory might not be real, but the feeling is.
New entries fill the ledger as I write, in hands not always mine. “The need for connection endures. Roots remember. Time loops. We are all seedlings.” Today, the data-tree at the center of the grove flowers with thousands of clocks: each one ticking out a different now, each one blinking with a name. We walk the forest, threading petals through our hair, steps imprinting new timelines with every beat. Whatever the anomaly is, it is made of memory and longing—a network of hope, refusing to be forgotten.
When the system resets again—and it will—I trust these words, these wandering ribbons, may find you. Even if you remember the world differently, even if things loop forever, please know: the forest is still growing, and so are we.
###END###
