The Forest On The Loose / Tell A Story To Me - The Last Forest
Dear friends, I will make a very short introduction, because the story, on this occasion, is a little long.
@Calluna, who organizes together with the @bananafish team the motivator contest Tell A Story To Me (bases here), has elaborated in this occasion a challenging premise that leads us to construct a story around the idea of the last forest. It is, as you can see, a rich and complex idea.
I tried to solve it narratively as best I could.
I hope you enjoy my story.
I am grateful.
Source
The Forest On The Loose
John Mendoza finished the recording. Then he took a few photographs of the Mayor next to the last tree, a sycamore tree, perhaps, would have to be investigated. He did the same to the operator of the Office of Development for Food Production, while making the first saw cuts in the trunk (the guy seemed very conscious of his minute of fame, because he made sure to lift his face towards the camera and tighten his biceps.)
He checked his camera to see if he had forgotten anything. He was always afraid of forgetting some important graphic and that's why he took an absurd amount of photos for each reportage. There were all of them, or so he believed: The Mayor with his fat cheeks, the Minister of Food Production with his even fatter cheeks; very important, the scientists who had cloned and made the genetic reserve pattern for the Akito Green Consortium; he also had photographs of the handsome and very young Custodian that Akito had chosen for the transfer of that important and valuable cargo to α-1, to the Museum of Life, in the biological museography quadrant.
He stared at the operators' work with their saws and the crane dragging the log sections until they asked him to leave the area. The vast washed away expanse of what had been the last forest and Mr. Riponché's home (he had interviewed him once long, during an amazing week's stay there) continued to filter a certain tragic beauty into the twilight.
He felt tired.
When he was in his car, he noticed that he was carrying a small blue-green beetle on his shirt. An escapist thought with some sudden joy. The insect had to be very skillful to escape the radar of the collecting units. He put it carefully in one of his boxes of gastric pills.
John wondered what a blue beetle would eat, and felt a disheartened disembodied spider spreading across his chest.
"It is obvious that the Riponché will become extinct with me. I have no brothers, no offspring, and I was too foolish and irresponsible, so I did not prepare anyone to inherit my legacy. It is always the old sin of pride. I lost all lawsuits with Confederate Majority. There are a couple of environmental groups that support my petitions to the Coalitions Supreme Court, but I am realistic: they are very unlikely to prosper and my cancer is terminal. I won't last. A good irony, isn't it? I'll die of lung cancer in the last place on Earth where you can breathe real fresh air!"
(Mendoza's voice replied with a question, but it was unintelligible and sounded choppy and distant.)
"It was never an eccentric rich man's whim! Those are lies! An old man on the verge of death tells him that! At first it was greed, I won't deny it. Forty years ago I hadn't set foot in Beetle Forest. It was my inheritance, but I had never set foot on it. Mr. Nemoto had always been in charge. To this day, as old as I am, he performs some functions, mostly counseling. We have a large team in charge, there are also many volunteers from the Sigma Free Villages. We had to fight. Once a psychopath gave us a herbicide attack. It was terrible.
"He was an employee of the Ministry. A madman. Was he taken prisoner? Of course not: decorated by the scoundrel Major Speaker of the Committee of Communes for Food Production."
Maybe you're the last one who dares to do a reportage on Beetle Forest, so I'll tell you something I want people to know:
My ancestors were rangers when this was the Beetle National Park a century ago. When the Global Readaptation and Survival plan began and the Coalitions Government put up for sale all the land with some productive possibility, my grandparents bought these acres. They never had the capital to develop the exploitation and my father, very young, joined the clandestine forces that made the guerrilla Government Coalitions. Those rebellious dreams ended when I was born and my parents founded Beetle Forest Tourism and became quite rich bringing tourists from Alpha and other places on Earth. You said it yourself when you arrived: it's like taking a trip back in time. Whoever comes once, always longs for it. In this place resides the wild joy of life, now I understand it. But at that time, I was not interested in business, but in squandering money at Asteroid Casinos. When I had spent almost everything, I came to inspect the property, to think about how to sell it. At that time, although Tourism Beetle Forest was almost bankrupt, I knew that the property had become very valuable at another level, as it was already the last forest on Earth. Colectionists were able to kill for it. But the Coalitions also wanted to expropriate it. By that time, they had made more than juicy deals with the Chinese colonies that migrated to α-1 and needed more farmland. At what point did the citizens of Earth who gave government authority to the Coalitions weaken our morale so much? We are the farm of foreign colonies in exchange for meager profits and indebtedness. When the last acre is exploited, we will be their slaves.
But Beetle Forest can do nothing against that will of destruction. Nor can the young rebels who have accompanied me in my struggles against this colossus. This is a battle that David is destined to lose.
Many nights of debate have gone by trying to find a way out. So we have chosen to open a trail: We will donate the Beetle Forest gene pool to the Museum of Life. We are already making arrangements with Akito Green.
(There was a long silence in the recording).
Mendoza opened another window in his browser. He began reviewing that morning's photographs and let the recording of the old unpublished interview run. Mr. Riponché had not made a mistake, the Coalitions had lobbied and their bosses had given in to self-censorship. Maybe he managed to slip something into the new reportage, now that nothing mattered and the forest had disappeared.
Where would all the birds have gone? And the insects? Although Mr. Riponché had managed to save the genetic reserve, the live specimens were auctioned by the Coalitions to customers who remained anonymous for fear of attacks by green guerrillas.
Mendoza tried to remember the face of the old man, he discovered that his image was diffuse in his memory. He remembered yes, his hands, that he moved constantly. His body was small and thin. He was histrionic. Dramatic. With that almost religious passion and something extravagant of some ecologists, a little hallucinated, and that he believed to perceive a superior conscience in nature.
He looked for a photograph of that occasion. Yes, there he was: the wide open yellow eyes looking behind the lenses, held precariously above the nose. The sharp face, toasted by the past days of sunshine and chemo. The skin like a parchment.
He started to run the associated video. Riponché's muffled, tired, yet silky voice filled the hearing aids. A small laugh introduced the comment.
"Why should we consider them ignorant just because we can play demiurge with a little engineering and biology? We would even have to be very foolish to think that there are no more mysteries, after seeing the possibilities that this same science has shown us. In my opinion, what science shows as a possibility is precisely the proof that many things that our small minds consider improbable can be probable. So, yes, I think the forest breathes with a living, higher consciousness and its beings are entities with a will to persist, and that includes beings whose existence is only intuited, like those feeric creatures which we know from ancient men. Have you really begun to observe the behavior of the blue beetle, which gives this forest its name?
Then Mendoza remembered the little passenger he had accidentally brought from the forest.
He took the pill box out of his shirt pocket. What does a blue beetle eat? He had some packaged broccoli in the refrigerator.
He carefully opened the box.
The beetle was gone.
Marcus Linn was handsome, young, disciplined, obsessive with work, and neat. Those qualities (and perhaps some of them were small pathological manias developing in the depths of his psyche) and his diploma in Tissue Conservation had been decisive in winning his position as Custodian in the mission.
Many colleagues had applied, because the bonus was extraordinarily attractive, because of the importance of the load and the transit time. In addition, it was a golden opportunity to firmly request his promotion and transfer to the Akito Green branch at α-1.
However, the real test to conquer definitively the command of the mission, had been the test of isolation: a week in invariable conditions of light and temperature, consuming exactly the same dehydrated rations on all occasions, in a reduced and monochrome space, with the only company of an arsenal of crossword puzzles. Marcus had won, without much resentment. The nearest container had lasted five days and, as soon as it left, a lawsuit was filed against the Akito Green Consortium.
The truth is that he had a good time. He had taken the opportunity to meditate and to train (he was addicted to calisthenics), because he knew that, if he won, and he was sure he would make it, two years of travel awaited him, aboard an armored unit of the Consortium, with the exclusive task of monitoring the sensors of the cryogenic cameras that conserved the genetic reserve of Beetle Forest, the last on Earth.
He was well aware of the importance of the task and of the risk that the mission implied for the prestige of the Consortium. He also knew that he was at serious personal risk. Basically, he would be locked in a security camera, aboard armoured transport (and artillery, as the risk of attacks by eco- terrorists).
He had signed a comprehensive Confidentiality Agreement and had taken a technical induction course for three weeks. There were also interviews, for which he trained with the Consortium's communication experts. He made sure to wear to all of them the regulatory blue sweatshirt of the employees, his brown hair neatly combed backwards, his beard properly shaved; in short, the media photographs showed a fairly handsome brown boy, despite his somewhat prominent nose and excessively pointed incisors. His mother baked him a farewell cake and cried dissimulately behind his glasses.
Now, at that precise moment, Marcus was about to enter what would be his habitation unit for the next two years. The real excitement began now.
The door was sealed with a pneumatic whisper.
Marcus checked the intercoms with the cockpit and the sanitary unit. He checked communication with the Consortium team on Earth. He examined the biological stabilisers of the cargo and started the logbook. He had supervised those cameras more than once during the induction. He had never noticed the sound these cameras emitted.
Day 56. The pulse has started to sound like a heartbeat these last two nights. The Akito engineering team on Earth doesn't think it's anything significant; but it won't let me sleep. It resonates with my own heartbeat.
I try to take naps to recover when the load beats go down.
Day 62. Pulse is interrupting communications. I am worried. I think there are sprouts. This morning I found a small tender green leaf next to the cameras. I find no explanation for this phenomenon. Nor can I find the origin of the outbreak. The containers are sealed.
I can't communicate with the crew.
Day 63. I hope it is temporary. The heartbeat is becoming more and more invasive. Not higher, but more enveloping. Will this be part of a terrorist attack? Communication is completely blocked. The manual controls on the floodgates are not working. I have activated an emergency pulse through the intercoms.
Day 66. Another leaf. It looks like a sycamore leaf.
Day 68. What if the crew makes jokes at my expense?
Today I found some mud on the cabin door. It was wet. I can't explain it.
Day 70. It's possible that tiredness played a trick on me. I slept about sixteen hours straight. I woke up with a very comforting sense of well-being, although nothing justified by the latest events.
Logic tells me that the guys upstairs must be playing heavy jokes on me. When I woke up, I had a beetle on my nose. I don't know where it went after the slap.
But the most intriguing thing is the girl.
So far I haven't been able to get her to talk.
Day 71. It has to be said: she is very attractive; very thin, though, and she took the trouble to wear something more entertaining than the Consortium uniform. Although I'm getting fed up with the role she plays. She makes strange signs. She stalks me. I think she calls me, but then she hides and I can't find her.
And I don't know how she manages to get in and out of the isolation unit.
Day 72. Apparently, there's a hidden passage in my unit.
I've seen her sneak in twice.
Tonight I will follow it.
"Taken from the Log of Cargo Custodian Marcus Linn, No. 1298, Akito Green Consortium, Ultimo Bosque Mission," wrote the Coalitions Supreme Court Disaster Inspector and kept the file in a protected folder.
The pizza boy, like every night of that last week, left the box on the neighboring desk. He passed a few tip credits to his cell phone. He would have given anything to change places with the deliveryman even one night. Instead, he had to deal with infiltrators, ecological terrorists and, now, sects of neo-panteism.
He reluctantly approached the pizza box. It was cold. And there was a bug walking over the pepperoni.
Was it a beetle?
The Disaster Inspector of the Coalitions Supreme Court gazed long, deep, at the tornasolated insect as it flapped its wings and, in a fluid, elegant motion, escaped through the window into the distant lights of the city.
¡Libertad para mi país!
Soy miembro de @TalentClub
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://adncabrera.vornix.blog/2019/05/15/the-forest-on-the-loose-tell-a-story-to-me-the-last-forest/
It must be frustrating to write such a complex, sophisticated story and not have a large audience for it. Perhaps not large, but appreciative. Yes, the forest lives. The idea of it is larger than our ability to destroy. Or at least we can wish it so.
Perhaps nature is not so enduring as your story suggests. But it is a lovely idea. Also nice that it comes in the form of a beetle, which is generally disdained by people. We are quick to crush beetles, and careless about protecting nature.
A great story.
Thank you for visiting and commenting, @agmoore. The trick is not to wait for long but for worthy readers, like you. And be clear that we write draft stories until the publication proves otherwise. I see, by the passion I feel in what you write, that you understand what I say.
I don't believe that nature is so indestructible either, but I do believe in the desire that it is not so. The truth is that I'm terrified to see what we do to the natural world, even if we don't need it to survive. I'm not an ecological romantic, I bet on rationality, but we have to see that human beings can be barbarians.
Always welcome!
Was the 'she' the beetle?
Posted using Partiko Android
Hello, @wakeupkitty! Not necessarily. When I conceived the story, I thought of the fact that it is not easy to destroy life. Somehow, it will look for a way to break through. In the story, moreover, there is the idea that the forest is something else, it is the bearer of a kind of consciousness that struggles to free itself.
I am enormously grateful for your visit. Always welcome.
The little blue beetle in this reminded me of Jurassic Park, and the famous 'life finds a way' quote, it works so well weaved into the story.
I really like how you have set this up, a story of two halves. The reporter who won't get to publish the real story, investigating it anyway - between the publicity shots. You establish so much world in your opening, and it is such a complete one at that, the bureaucracy of an established system, the greed and shortsightedness of man giving way to reflection and regret with age, and the desire to put right the follies of youth, I love how much you just drop in there, 'Asteroid Casinos', it really helps make this. You set the scene perfectly for the second half, Marcus's determination and dedication that carries him through to his role as custodian, the stark reality of his situation, so brilliantly highlighted by the difference in his real appearance and how he appeared in his publicity shots. And then the isolation! The time he spends in the forest, the build of suspense and tension, the edging in of fear tinged with wonder. This bit is brilliant, the blurred line between delusion and the forest coming to life, has he been there so long he can hear it's heart beat? Or has he encountered something that is causing him to hallucinate? There is a sense of fear that both builds and subsides in the appearance of the impossible girl. The cut to someone reading the log, and the pizza boy, gives a more foreboding sense of what may have happened to Marcus. I wonder, has that little bug travelled to the exact right place, it feels like it could be an agent of the forest, finally able to get to the other side of the cameras. Although on a human level this feels like a story of two halves in one way, in another it doesn't, for it feels more like the story of the forest, told through the trees, and through the tenacity of a single blue beetle <3
It's a beautiful read, @bananafish.
Umberto Eco said that the writer wrote a part of the text, and the rest was built by the reader. I believe in these words without a doubt. There are readings, like the one you just did, that improve the texts.
The idea of the forest as a life with a will that opens the way to persist is in the text. That life is magical, and this text opens up to a fantastic overflow, which is a metaphor for the mystery of the persistence of life. In truth, it seems a miracle that the earth remains.
I regret that the end was more open than I would have liked. However, this contest has allowed me to have a draft to correct. It's wonderful!