The Crest

The recruits stood awestruck. They stared at the emaciated creature as it staggered into the compound. Bones visible against the animal’s tawny-beige fur. It seemed unafraid, its sole focus seemingly to find shade, possibly a place to die in peace.

Months earlier, the recruits arrived on the Crest for basic training. Boot camp was painful and unorthodox for the conscripts. Security for the enclave became the overriding priority. Out there, out in the charred vestiges of Oeste Americano, moved a crusading force that chewed up civilization like mincemeat, annihilating everything in its path.

But on this particular day, this creature of God, once the majestic king of the wildlands, beseeched the humans with its eyes to provide it water and food. On this day, it lowered its pride for the humans; it entered their world, and begged. The creature’s belly and massive paws were black from soot. It stumbled, but somehow righted itself. Its hind legs weak, it had been traveling days. The recruits crowded closer to see this soul of the wild.

The wild animal had many names owing to its once historic range across the Americas. The humans called it painter, ghost cat, deer tiger, screamer, and catamount. Some named it purple feather, el leon, panther, puma, cougar, or just plain mountain lion.

There was little left for the creature to survive on in the scorched hinterlands, the Shift assured to that. The cat at one time weighed over 200 pounds, now it was down to eighty. If the mammal could talk, it might agree with the Antisis that mankind had mutilated the planet, progressed too far, gone off the deep end. They weren’t far off in that regard, they had a decaying planet as ‘exhibit A,’ but it wasn’t that clear cut. It’s never lucid who is to blame; humans after all changed the planet over several millennia. The God of the Antisis knew who to blame though; their God always knew, it was a righteous one.

The Antisis deliberated. Why a collapse now? Why a tipping point now? The Shift became unfathomable for their uncultivated minds. Their plans for vengeance grew like cancer. They repeated the credo in what became a self-fulfilling prognostication. Science wronged us and it’s payback time.

The Antisis wanted the land back — all of it, and they wanted everyone to live off the soil, to survive off the land. They wished a return to the earth; truly a noble brainchild in the minds of anarchists, but an inexplicable ecology considering there wasn’t anything to live off.

The big cat simply wanted to live. One of the defenders put out a pan of water and food for the cougar. It stopped and drank and ate, grateful, but nervous, then it moved on, finding a measure of sanctuary in the enclave.

The young recruits on the Crest, for their part, maintained few enlightened thoughts about their situation. Like the mountain lion, they were drafted into hostilities they did not seek, and a dystopia they did not create. The juxtaposition between the two world outlooks could not have been starker. For the defenders, the Dark Ages happened during their coming of age.

Of course, the graduating classes of every high school in the Greater Portland area didn’t have a say in this defense strategy. But it didn’t matter because Permafrost was in charge and there was no debate. The high school kids were a convenient, unempowered, and uniformed group. Perfect for the Crest.

Every year, they held a big ceremony for the new Crefor recruits. Each year at every high school graduation they announced the names of the people and their assigned quadrant along the Crest.

Basic training was not like in the movies unless you watched comedies. After a week of rudimentary fitness, they learned to shoot weapons. Everyone practiced how to fire an M-4 and the 50 caliber. Most of them couldn’t hit the side of a barn but they eventually got better.

Everyone threw a live hand grenade. God, the drill sergeant Wild Bill Johnson seemed crazy letting these recruits throw those things.

These conscripts spent their teenage years playing video games; their skill sets were urban, cerebral, collaborative, non-confrontational, the opposite of the times they lived in. Joining a mission to fight fanatics was crazy indeed.

In hand-to-hand combat, they got punched, bruised, laid flat on their backs by the instructors. Wild Bill loved to harass the male recruits; he twisted them in various contortions for that terrible, painful week of basic martial arts and self-defense. Now, the conscripts began a different type of training altogether, plant science.

The instructor walked to the front of the room. “Welcome to botany class,” he said to a group of thirty students.

“You might wonder what you’re doing here. What does your basic training have anything to do with plants? It has everything to do with your mission. At this facility, we are growing some of the hardiest trees in the world, capable of enduring extreme weather, adept in surviving the Shift. You are here to defend these seedlings.”

The recruits listened. “How goes it?” Ben asked the other student sitting in the chair beside him.

“Sore as hell.” Lenore showed his bruises.

“I’m just grateful for the rest, even if it is in the classroom,” Ben said.

The instructor paced back and forth. “At FORC, we conduct world-class research on plant communication. And sorry to say to you there are no mutant plants with dark magic powers that are going to take over the world. What we are trying to do here is learn how plants communicate with themselves and other species, including humans.”

The instructor looked out on a room of blank stares. “Plants connect in ways we don’t think about, olfactory, chemical, and electrical, acoustic, and fungal. If a certain insect attacks them, they send out a pheromone scent in the air. If they are sick, they may send out a chemical through their roots. They can send out electrical signals on their leaf tips. But we here at FORC are going beyond traditional plant communication, we are also attempting to communicate through sound.”

“We grow plants that can survive out there.” He pointed to the void beyond the Crest as if it was another planet.

“Your schedule is basic training for five days a week and botany classes the other two days. During these two days, you have a break from PT and hand-to-hand combat, but there will be no slacking off, and no sleeping in class. They will test you on basic plant biology. You’ll apply your brain power to learn basic botanical theories. You’ll understand why you are here defending FORC. Starting today you will learn taxonomy, physiology, and genetics.”

The recruits silently complained. My God. We need sleep, not genetics.

“Later, in part two you’ll learn about horticultural principles like nursery operations, grafting, potting, seeding, etc. watering. In the last part of this course, you will learn about plant communication and the technology used to study plants.”

The instructor looked at the group and spoke solemnly. “You understand you are protecting the last of the research citadels, now that most of the universities have been destroyed across our beloved country. There are only a handful of institutions that can defend themselves. Imagine you are the Great Library at Alexandria in 40 CE trying to survive an attack from Julius Caesar.” Magna bibliotheca Alexandrinus.

The recruits got the same theme over and over. The instructors repeated certain phrases like, “You are the last hope, we have to make this work, and the trees are the only path forward.”

The trainees practiced fighting techniques on the Crest one day and studied photosynthesis on the weekend. They threw hand grenades one week and grafted plants on Sundays.

One day they took a tour of the five million tree seedlings, spent the whole day walking around FORC. At each stop they saw a different cohort of seedlings, some were big-leaf maples, some were firs, some were Oregon white oaks. The scientists gave the cohorts different names. Big leaf maples were AM21, Acer macrophyllum cohort 21.

Their instructors put it this way. “You lay down your life for these seedlings.” They carried on and on about how five million seedlings were going to normalize the climate in the Pacific Northwest, bring back water to the watersheds, and restore habitats.

The recruits had their doubts. Lay down our lives for plants, fat chance.

One day, they learned about photosynthesis. The instructor explained, “A healthy human breathes in about 1631 pounds of oxygen a year while a healthy maple tree produces 254 pounds of oxygen each year so the average human requires 7.4 trees to stay alive.”

They learned nursery operations skills, grafting, potting, seeding, watering, etc. The defenders enjoyed working with the plants. After that they introduced them to the machines that measured photosynthetic gas exchange, that is O2 and CO2. They learned that plant pigment is called chlorophyll. They learned what an electret condenser microphone was and hung them in the trees.

On the last day, the director of FORC spoke to the 2300 graduates in a large auditorium in the town of Sandy. They used this large building for all the large gatherings of the FORC community. Early German settlers migrated to this historic logging town named after the Sandy River, an auspicious name, especially as the toponymic Sandy became the literal Sandy.

“My name is Danielle Fournier and I am the executive director of the Forest Research Center, otherwise known as FORC. Thank you for protecting us, the scientists, the facilities, and most of all the trees. Those on the outside hate us; they detest us for what we are doing here. There is a history with our species and that history is that humans have always beaten down science. It’s in our DNA to detest the unknown, distrust anything out of the ordinary.”

She paused, introspective; she looked into the eyes of the recruits. “Humans fear a lot, that is why we need you. We need young people with open minds. The people on the outside want to destroy us. They hear information about FORC and they create these wild theories about plants. That is why I am here to explain what we do.”

She hesitated, gathering her thoughts. She’d given this speech many times to thousands of new recruits. Some days, she wondered whether they understood the mission and FORC. She wondered, and yet with the new scientific breakthroughs coming in, it was astounding. She wondered how much she should tell them.

“We communicate with the seedlings. Really, we do.” Danielle spread her hand out in a gesture.

“We are making ground-breaking breakthroughs on this front, stunning in fact. The rest of the former sovereign states know about this. We are welcoming hundreds of plant biologists, who want to work with FORC. They risk their lives to come here.”

She stood another moment and then continued. “I’d like you to hear something.” She motioned to a researcher to turn on a loudspeaker.

The speakers boomed across the group of two hundred.

Click, click, click, pause click, click, click, pause, click, click, click.

The sound came in multiples of three, steady, and pulsing out to the seated recruits.

Danielle motioned to turn down the sound. “The sound you heard is a recording from the seedlings. The other night, we captured this. We believe the seedlings around you and the trees on the outside are communicating with each other. We don’t know what this communication means, but we picked up audible frequencies at 220 hertz.”

She stared out at the 2300 dumbfounded faces in the audience. Did they even understand what this development meant? she thought.

“The millions of seedlings around you are the last hope for our forests here in Oregon. We selected these trees for their hardiness to the harsh meteorologic conditions we face. These trees are the future of forestry. That is why we listen to them. We need to know what they need.”

“Outside, as we speak the research stations across the former sovereign states of America are falling one by one. They’ve destroyed numerous research stations, their researchers tortured and killed. The Antisis detest the trees and the laboratory facilities here in the enclave. They are Luddites, they say that climate change is an experiment by the scientists to control the world. They say we are breeding mutant trees that glow in the dark.” The crowd laughed.

“They say we are creating trees that can produce dark waves that can paralyze humans.” More laughing from the crowd.

“The anti-science crowd has no food. They do not believe in growing their own food like we do here in the enclave. What they do is pillage enclaves and hunt and ravage the land. God knows what they are eating now. I shudder to think. They think that they can live off the land like their pre-modern ancestors. They harvest every camas bulb they can find and catch every fish in the streams. Wherever they go, they destroy the land. They are coming for FORC, our trees, our scientists, and our food supplies.”

She lingered once more. “Go back to the old days, they say. Well, I am here to say that we can’t do that. Primitive thinking will not sustain our population. The old ways are full of hate and superstition. We will not march backward.”

The crowd applauded. Danielle smiled, pleased with her speech.

“Can I answer your questions?” A group of hands raised. She picked one.

“What about those wanting to come in? The planties. I hear there are hundreds of them out there?”

“There are those that follow a unique journey in their lives. They are plant empaths and drawn here by some signal. We do not know what that signal is, but these people feel it is their duty to come, to serve, and to protect the trees we’re growing. We must not turn them away. I will tell you something else, the plant empaths have a connection to the plant world. A connection we cannot understand.”

In the back of the crowd, she overheard some recruits chanting. “Witch, witch, witch, witch, witch.” It echoed in the auditorium.

Danielle knew they directed those words at her. “If you have a problem with my speech, why don’t you stand up and introduce yourselves?”

The rest of the auditorium heard the chanting now, but then another person yelled. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Why don’t you come over here and make us shut up?” Said another.

The words witch, witch, witch grew louder. Another group of conscripts rushed the chanters, and the melee began. The place became wild. Both sides punched and smashed chairs on each other.

After twenty minutes, they broke up the brawl and the recruits left the auditorium. The chanters lay bloodied on the ground.

Danielle stood there and watched them depart. “Just another day in FORC,” she said to Fernando mockingly.

“Just another day,” he said amusingly.

She raised her eyebrows. “These are the people that defend us?”

“Yep.”