Death Garden of the Lawful Malcontent

A GreenPunk Story by WilliamJJackson

June

2101

Alec waged war against the foliage. Broad leaves of shiny green, dense as an old rain forest from the movies, pushed back as much as he shoved ahead. Thick vines wrapped up in smaller versions of themselves tripped up him and his lanky old pal Collins. But they fought on. Past the gnarled cacao trees. Beyond the curtain of ivy ensnaring their limbs. Onward to the goal.

The goal? Open space. Found! Alec Siefer and Collins McKay, once impeccable in Mandarin collar suits with the new fangled AI pocket squares aglow, suits wet from humidity and perseverance, exited the victorious jungle. Alec stomped his foot to hear the reverberating clang again.

"Metal walkway! How did it vanish so completely, and what kind of purebred idiot would be dumb enough to let this death garden grow so out of control?" He wiped sap, tree spit, from a sleeve.

Collins, sure to scratch himself to death, coughed on purpose as he slapped on yet another antihistamine patch.

"I hate when you cough to make me notice something," Alec growled, "so very passive aggressive. Speak up! Who or what?"

"Mmm? Someone not happy, I take it?" posed the who or what from across the way. She rose from a squatting position, an orange-brown woman with a solid form, tight pants and loose crimson blouse, low cut. Black and dark brown hair, light on the curls, blew in the breeze. She tended to some variety of flora at the other end of this enclosed arboretum.

Alec wrinkled his nose. "Are you Siggy Soltero?"

"Casiguaya Soltero," she announced, thick Hispanic accent, an index finger raised for emphasis, "Siggy is what my friends call me. You are?"

"My apologies," Alec corrected himself fast, ever prompt with the manners.

"You are the one, right? The Battle Gardener of the Amazon?" Collins couldn't hide the awe in his voice if he'd been paid to.

Miss Soltero turned to face the sweaty entourage. Her face, pretty and young, a faint scar divided her left eyebrow. Eyes coffee ground dark studied them. "I sell my babies to some South American countries, or what's left of them. I make good money and have the highest civic points spread. And, yeah, when they try to level my work, I battle." She pursed her lips, and then returned to caring for a potted, colorful heliconia.

Alec, ever the techie, put his square to good use. Out came the holographic news footage. "Your claims are quite the understatement, Miss. Digitimes dubbed you the Battle Gardener after the Peruvian War killed off the Amazon. Lush life from radioactive death zones. Plants radiate levels humans can't take, like wolves near old Chernobyl, but it grew up big. You then went on to train other battle gardeners, but none are as good as you. No offense."

"None taken." She meandered about the hologram, watching the many brief images as if she were observing someone else's life. "Ah. The Peruvian War. It started as a war between the nuclear bigwigs ended, and stalled as the war with the Arabs and Europe blew out over Africa and the Black Sea. War, war, war. Kill, take, beat. We seize and leave behind wreckage. Nature seizes too, but builds wonders over and around the death, even from it. When will we learn?"

Collins moved past his sheepish nature. "Then, you haven't heard yet?"

"Heard? I've heard my babies the past many days. I stay in here a lot." She had the green stains and pollen perfume to prove it.

"The war," said Alec, "the last war, so they tell us, is ending. The Euro Bloc finally acceded, for the most part. Armistice is scheduled for three months from now. Sure, they'll kill some more until then, maybe even set off another set of smart nukes." He gulped, thinking of the dust crater once called Vienna. "World's fatigued, drained after four back-to-back wars going nonstop for seventy years. I mean..." He threw up an arm to show the way. High over their heads, the transparent steel dome of Orbital Station Unity fifteen meters above gave a crystal clear view of the pale blue dot. Clouds white, graphite gray and fallout black wisped about the globe. Between the wisps, the continents stood out over the many cerulean seas. Dark land masses. Brown swirls. Red dust of Africa. Thousands of craters. Very, very, very little greenery. War bouquets.

Miss Soltero breathed a sigh of genuine relief. "Wepa! It's about time! Another year or more of this and we'd have lost the Southeast Asian ecosystem for good. Okay, so what do you think I can do for you?"

The holograms changed to the European Theater. Desolation, one tract after another. Pale children, bones showing through their skin, wailing, meandering about naked. Skeletons along the roadside. Ruptured French MASER tanks. Crashed P-180F strafer bomber wreckage. Another weekly bulletin count to bring it on home that the total death count from all the many wars now stood at over three hundred and twenty-eight million (not counting those from disease, hunger, and ethnic cleansings). Forty-four percent of the planet, starving.

Casiguaya shivered, hugged herself. She looked to her plants for comfort.

"Miss Soltero, we hopped on an orbital drone soon as Brussels gave the go ahead. There's a lull in the fighting. Berlin is gone. The Union wants you to regrow the Black Forest." Alec advanced her way, whipped out a foldable tablet to display the craters up close. "What we're up against--"

She never even gave it a side glance. Miss Soltero waved it off. "No. I don't...just get to the point."

Collins removed the hologram, huffed. "Corporate sector's holding out after this the fourth crash in twenty years. They bet all on cash and derivatives. The point system started by Brazil and with the monthly stipend credit you received, well, the Union will effectively quintuple your supply of both, per diem. Can it be done?" He asked with all the innocence of a toddler gazing up at vastness of the universe.

She headed for a path, one so small Alec and Collins had to keep up, lest the foliage concealed it and Casiguaya appear to have melded into the brush. But there it was, and she pursued it, back beyond the dense bush to a more open area, where spindly barrigonas rubbed their palm leaves against an earth tone tree house and the transparent steel hull, space and Nature as living art. Casiguaya made for the stairs. The men from Earth followed her, posing questions about how to renew the soil, can native trees and flowers be returned to Germany, can crops be grown nearby to accommodate the anorexic masses outside of Hamburg, Dresden and Hanover.

"Miss Soltero, if there's a chance, no matter how slight--"

"Aye! I came up here to get away from your death! All you people know is money and land and murder. Then, you come to me, a lover, to fix it so you can ruin it again!" Casiguaya pulled her hair, bit the heck out of her lower lip.

"Miss, war machines are pulling back from that area. There is a real chance for rebirth here. What you did in the Amazon made people sit up and take notice. Who's fought in the Amazon Basin since? Nobody. Too scared to lose the jungle again. In Germany, the Rec-V's--"

"Reconstructionist Visionaries? Heh! You mean the guys who got their modus operandi from the tactics of fundamentalists in the screwed up twenty-first century? That's a government to you? Terrorist is the real name."

"I mean the official government of the German people. Elected. Far from fundamentalism, ma'am."

The way Casiguaya snapped her body and moved at Alec, Collins was certain she would strike him. She stopped dead at his chin. "Hey! Terrorism is fear via violence against another nation, yeah? Whether it's by Calcutta Separatists, Cambodian Jihadis or state sponsored military action, you tell me how guns and tanks in your backyard, killing cultures and severing familial ties isn't terrorism! Idolizing the last great battlefield or massacre only keeps war going."

Alec licked his lips and tried to find the words. "The current war is the only one in memory fought for a real cause. Self defense. The Germans were attacked by the Turkish Red Movement. Thousands died that day in Augsburg. Are you serious? The whole world knows--"

"The whole world knows that the TRM was a piss ant cell of no more than fifty men. Fifty! And for the work of a few idiots, the Euro-Atlantic Union okays Germany to blow Turkey off the map to avoid another War on Terror like the old days? They didn't have enough problems at the time with a political upheaval and a civil war? Listen, I got my start battling for Nature in a mercury and fecal infested mudhole outside of Adana. Put to use skills my bisabuelo taught me, skills he learned helping rebuild Puerto Rico after Maria gutted her way back when. Well, thirty years later, and where are we? Germany wouldn't stop with the boom boom. So Ukraine jumps in to stop them, which pulled in Canada, somehow, and Poland and Norway and--"

"Right, right! Got it!" Alec's hands were blurs waving before his reddened face. "We're on a mission. A desperate one. Your old students are locked down regrowing other parts of the world, two are on Mars, and another is helping build new islands for the Maldives. They say you are the only and best chance to re-forest Europe, and get food to people."

He held his arms open, maybe awaiting a high five, a hug, a compassionate sigh. What Alec got was Casiguaya Soltero pacing the tree house floor, kicking the wicker mat, tapping the weightless keys of a lightform keyboard on an oval desk.

"The World Storage Bank? They'll send seed and food ahead of us?" Her eyes roved from nervous, perspiring Collins McKay to empty hug Alec Siefer.

"I've been instructed to initiate whatever requests you make. Get the ball rolling."

"Black Forest. Deciduous. Haven't done them in a long time."

"By the time this is over, you'd be the richest woman in the solar system," Collins tapped away at his lightscreen tablet. Math, triple checked.

"Riches?" Casiguaya began another charge, but then cooled her jets. "Riches? Who wants riches? Did you see those naked kids? I mean, do you even look at the vids you guys pull up? Computer, dame la tecla de mando ahora." The thin light beams creating a computer on the desk vanished. Lights out. Tree house went dark. "Okay, let's do this."

"Now? You want to go right now? Don't you...need to...pack?"

"Nope!" She stormed past them and out there.

"One outfit?"

"Yep!"

"Um," Collins felt bad, an urge to assist the female of the species kicked in. "Ah, anything, anything we can get you on the way?"

"So long as this dumb drone of yours can whip some black coffee and a half decent mallorca, then no."

August 14

2101

Crying annoyed her, so Casiguaya put a stop to it. Let the anger do its job. Five feet from her little mango athletic heels that kept her on the balls of her feet rested the lip of the first crater, a massive reddish French kiss forcing open the mouth of the Earth. Like rape. Shards of metal from skyscrapers leaned over in the distance, right before the flat land dropped off into even deeper craters, fissures and pools of the all too beloved mercury and engine fuel. I had good times in Berlin. Once.

No one would be having any sort of time there anymore. Berlin, she was reconciled to the past. A survivor of a world war long ago, but now, not even a misty memory. No trace. Not a skeleton nor a cornerstone or tattered flag. The Turks vowed revenge. They apparently were more serious than most. Someone said the fighting would stop. In the distance, bombs fell.

"It took this to get them to sit at the same table," Alec whispered. A howling wind made this day, the sixty ninth after getting Casiguaya off the station, one best forgotten. It took these last few months for her to stomach taking a shuttle west to view the remains, and her tears claimed them as if Miss Soltero was Berlin's widow.

"I'm spent. Let's go back. So much to do."

The shuttle ride to what had been the Black Forest in all its glory went in abject silence. In these sixty-nine days, Alec had gotten to know almost nothing about Casiguaya Soltero, and she, so far as he could tell, had no interest in getting to know him. She hired twenty people with Union funds from the Caribbean only. Hurricane survivors. War veterans. Artists. Old firefighters who burned a fourth of Colombia and Iraq down back during the Drug Purges of the 2040's. No politicians. Not a single soldier. No robots, except when drones dropped off supplies (practically an around-the-clock situation). What did it bolster?

As the shuttle landed on parched ground next to collapsible printer huts and old campfires, the view was pitifully optimistic. In the center of what had been forest but now had the all the luster of an ancient salt flat, five acres of budding trees weathered the wind. Tightly packed, five to a square foot (she swore it would work best this way). People with scars and cybernetics mixing up black soil from human waste, coffee grounds, taking mineral samples to ensure the perfect composition for the next acreage of supposedly rapid growth forest. While Alec had to admit these little trees, beeches mainly, oaks, Scots pine, elm and others were sprouting well from dead clay scraped down only one foot, he doubted this cradle of greenery would one day make a forest in--

"Ten years, you say?"

Casiguaya slapped dust from silken tan slacks. "How many times are you going to ask me? It's been like, three times a week now! Yes! Ten years. Watch." She pointed out to the bleak horizon, dead zone all around, wind and ashes. "We hold it down, and let Nature remember what used to be here. She will feel the tug of her plants again, and let them sink in. Some she'll eat, others she'll feed. You saw South America? You went to La Isla del Encanto? Well?"

He shrugged. Yes, he went to both, and saw the majesty. No way to tell war or disaster had ever so much as tickled either. Lush green flora, from coastline to mountain base. But Alec, despite his vast analytical mind and penchance for progress, put his faith in tech. Tech then, tech now, tech forever. Between his visits here, he helped beta test a force field dubbed Brella, which would offer just the right amount of repellant to keep rain off the entire body. So far, the tech was all wet. Never say die.

"Listen, young man, maybe techie stuff is big in the Windy City, but to get mankind on the go around the clock? Oxygen. Water. Clean water. Dirt. Good dirt. Crops. Done by hand. I do it to prove it is the best way." She moved for her hut, stopping only long enough to view another hectare of land farther off, one brimming with agriculture.

"'Young man'? I'm thirty six."

"Oh? Perdoneme. Fifty-three over here." She went inside.

"You can't be! Not a single wrinkle!"

"Brown don't frown, youngling! We'll try again tomorrow."

FOREST SIZE: 5.13 acres

September

2103

Brella control slip disc. Aerogel wallet. Rolled up computer. Three different types of stylus. These items were pulled out of Alec's pockets, his day finished. Yawning, scruffy along the jaw, he scratched and stared into an oval mirror.

"Ready?"

Casiguaya scared the woo-hah right out of him. Alec jumped, almost into the sink.

"Wha--! Don't do that! Ever! I just came back from the worst flight over--"

She patted him on the rear. "Relax, Itchy. I heard. Germans were bombing a cell of Turk infiltrators in Bremen. Bad stuff. Didn't I tell you those talks would stall? Again."

He tried to calm down. "Yeah, you did. I had some doubts as well. Think they'll bring the fighting this way?"

"Better not, or I'll face them down."

"Right. You. One woman. A battalion of MASER tanks. Okay."

He began to feel downright strip-searched by the assaulting stare she gave off.

"Watch me. C'mon. I'll show you what two years has done. You've been gone a long time."

"Miss me?" He half meant it.

"Eh. You are easy on the eyes." She mostly meant it.

Alec tossed on a floral polymer shirt, waterproof, slippery aqua with the temperature control touch, and galloped outside. Two years had brought a series of mechanized rowhouses of brick (the sole robotic work out here Casiguaya allowed) which replaced the transitional huts. Those Alec saw from the scramjet, along with what seemed to be a tripling in worker numbers. But the view of the infantile forest was obscured by black smoke, a chemical fire blowing in from the west. Rec-V's felt it best to light up the cocktails in the many craters alight to burn off the stench and concentrate the remainder into fuel for the war machines. Short term gain. Long term damage.

What Alec took in astounded him. All the trees he remembered as year-old saplings up to his waist were now tall as him, some taller. Thin, brown, beautiful green leaves. All alive, abundant and sunk in a rich earth he could barely see. There were few weeds, or space for that matter, from one tree to the next. Pretty soon leaves would degrade into those special fiery colors that heralded the miracle of autumn. A few students from university pulled out the fragments of weeds, but you couldn't squeeze a thigh in between any two plants. He was summarily...

"Impressed. I admit it, hands down. I am impressed with the growth rate. It won't be a forest eight years hence, but it's very impressive nonetheless."

"As I knew you would be. Everyone is once they see it." Casiguaya stood in a sheer violet poncho, it and a pair of huge circular copper earrings blowing in the hot wind.

Alec observed her figure as much as he did the trees. He saw nothing under the poncho but curves and became quite imaginative. The whole view pleased him utterly. Then he remembered the box. A hand dug deep into the one thing left in a pocket dimension.

"Almost forgot," he got it out, stepped up to her and opened it. "I had a two-hour layover in Rekjavik. Infozerk is working on something new, and they thought of your work."

She smiled at him, big and close-eyed and fantastic. He returned with a smile of his own, slight and controlled and very masculine. Once her eyes set on the object within, the smile died.

"I don't understand."

He approached, standing behind her to better point at it. "Latest tech. This is an android bug."

"Android. Bug." Her face experienced seizures. Nature was her love. But the aversion to insects, so human, never faltered. "Why did they have to make it look so..."

"So much like an oriental cockroach? Cool, huh! I marvelled at the design for hours. This is the world's first mobile garden printer."

Her head jerked, snapped, looked back at Alec in amazement. "This?"

"Yes, ma'am. Put it into the ground after activation. The bug eats any dirt, hard clay, small pebbles, whatever. Spits out top of the line black soil, microbes and all, from its rear." He beamed.

"How long would it take one of these things to make enough soil for even one square foot, much less several thousand hectares? And what about nano-pollution or matter conversion particle byproducts?"

"No nanos in the design. Thus far, the betas revealed a byproduct of less than zero point one-six-five percent arsenic. Good odds."

"My babies' roots can easily eat that up." The tone of her voice. So high. Hope on wings. "But still, the one--"

"Ah, ah, ah! You mean," Alec pointed back to his rowhouse. Outside, men from the turbo ride company were dropping large polymer crates near the door. "Not the one. The one hundred thousand."

Casiguaya first had the face of an old woman suffering from fits and the flu at the same time. Contorted. Squishy-faced, tongue jammed between clenched teeth. All those bugs running about, by choice! But as it sank in, the totality of time spent on soil production by hand, grabbing coffee from around Europe, waste, minerals from 'fourth state' sewage incinerators. Digging up acre after acre of brutal land. She loved it. She tired of it at times. Could these pests prosper?

"You weren't going to stop until you got some kind of tech into my zone, huh?"

"Nope. It helps. Maybe not always, Casiguaya, but sometimes it does big things."

"Siggy."

"What?"

"Call me Siggy from now on." She offered a soft lift of the corners of her full lips.

He stared into her orange-brown skin. "Sure thing, Siggy. Pleasure to meet you."

FOREST SIZE: 10.9 hectares [26.934 acres]

April

2106

"I don't care! I'm going out there right now!" Siggy ran full on, heedless to the Grim Reaper coming her way on a spongy pinkish force field drive.

MASER tank. The D-40-EP 'Platzen', to be precise. Top of the line, a sleek tortoise aerogel shell with two microwave emitter antennae, full spectrum optics and Gauss rifles on the dual side fins. She hovered over the western flats of Germany, studying, scoping out. Ahead of her, the Black Forest, impenetrable brush of green over scaly brown-gray bark, poppy yellow buttercups dotting the outskirts. To the far right, an unending bed of plowed fields awaiting the next round of planting, encampments of the once starving now being fed.

But war hungry Germany had had enough.

The Reconstructionist Visionary Party had won election. Proudly they waved the blood red flag of revenge, of eternal bloodletting. Newly crowned President Alarik Dengle proclaimed the cratered state must, 'Remain so forever. Let our eyes always have the burning ember of the death holes in the East, the red strain of vengeance. Never rest, until even the name of Turkey is wiped from human history." What being a third generation soldier in a continual war state gets you.

Siggy, drenched in sweat, waved her hands before the faceless machine as particles of dust drifted around the force field.

"Hey! Stop! You better not get any closer! The Union certified this forest! The Union! Hey!" She began to try and find a way to climb up on it.

Alec had the tablet in his hand, the new one that was really a slim polymer rod which released a light screen with a hand wave. He looked about the camp, now a full fledged small Bohemian city, and panicked. Think. Think!

Siggy ran and jumped. Ran. Jumped. On the third take, she got enough height to grab the lowest climbing rung and hoist her body up. She kicked what looked like blacked out windows. "Hey! Asesino! Cruel! Go back where you came from!" Hands punched unbreakable metal. She wished she were a robot now, that she'd hired an army of them to stand guard, just for an event such as this. Anger. Rage. Powerlessness.

The antennae hummed. Siggy felt an itch under her skin, and then a hot flash burn.

Thought evacuated. Survival instinct swarmed the mind. Siggy leaped right off of the tank. A snap met her on the way down as the wrist landed wrong. Alive. Busted up, but still breathing as the antennae arce down to fire.

Alec and others came up. They charged, throwing rocks at the MASER. Siggy saw more detail as they got closer.

"What are you doing? Rocks won't..."

The thrown objects hit the tank and started to roll down. Right before they bounced off, they stopped dead, turned, and scurried around its surface. Android roaches. It took precious seconds for them to find their way inside, but in they went.

Meanwhile, the antennae unleashed their effects. Alec screamed for the crew to get low. He looked behind him. Siggy cried out as the leading edge of the forest wilted, grass to an invisible flamethrower. Buttercups cooked. A tenth of an acre. One fifth. A quarter of an acre of land boiled down, dehydrated, all in the name of generational warfare and unending mobilization.

And then, the tank sputtered. The ion engine powering the field went kerplunk. Platzen felt flat, hard onto the stony ground. Inside of it, the faint cries of men screaming about bugs.

Alec got up and ran over to Siggy, nursing her hand. He grabbed her, checked her from head to toe. "You good? Siggy? Siggy!"

She didn't see him, nor did she hear his concern. Siggy saw only the ruination, the death garden. The immense growth behind it, hard fought, hard worked, good times grown out of bad, were out of her vision.

"Bastards. When? When does it end?" She turned back to the impotent tank. The kicking resumed.

"What will it take? What? What!"

FOREST SIZE: 48.75 hectares [120.46 acres]

June

2107

The smell of alcapurrias made Alec stay in the kitchen. Those fun brown bits of deep fried seasoned meat sheathed in a dough of shredded plaintain and yucca drove his stomach crazy with delight. Over the years, he raced home (yes, 'Forestburg' as they called it, was home to him now) as much for Siggy's cooking as he did to see how the work went. Alcapurrias by the truckload. Frijoles negros steeped in garlic and culantro. Chicken breasts sat overnight in an adobo and annatto batter, fried to perfection, resting next to slippery brown yellow sauteed sweet platanos. Alec snatched food like a starving child. He had good reasons: a long flight from Hong Kong (where the agonizing war treaty was held), visions of Siggy (whose face never left his mind) and the surprise...

"Collins, you old Martian mongrel, you!" He yelled with a stuffed mouth. "What brought you back to the pale blue dot? I heard you say before that once you go red..."

"I missed my buds, and I wanted to tell you two about the diversity engineering in Mons City," he said, cautiously licking an alcapurria. "And, to see what's going on with you two in the woods." He lifted his brow. Twice.

Alec looked his old pal from college over. He seemed, what? Taller? Mature? No longer a virgin? Alec couldn't put his finger on it, so he moved on to other thoughts. A look out the window, at the spectacular vista of trees. Many of them, the first plantings from years before, were sturdy, a foot in diameter each or more. The air thick with lightning bugs. God, when was the last time in Europe he'd seen them? Ladybugs clung to the window screen. "We're making the world a greenhouse again. Well, Siggy is. I bring a few tech pieces now and again."

Siggy returned to the kitchen from her private study. Her shoulders were tense.

"Well? What happened?" Alec knew she was on the screen with the WC.

Her flat expression met Collins, and then Alec. Slowly, the stare began to glow. "The World Court found Dengle guilty. They've outlawed the Rec-V Party. No more tanks. No more landscape martyrdom."

"I told you!" Alec slammed a fork down. He moved over and hugged the life out of Siggy. "Your testimony did it, right? I bet it did! Not a dry eye in the courtroom once she got done! That'll teach them to drive a tank right at a lone citizen!" He spun her around the kitchen as Collins clapped. Maybe Alec never noticed the kiss he planted on Casiguaya, brief as it was. She did, however. It made her blush. She gently forced her hands on his arms, and he let her down, unaware, still yipping his shrill war cry. She played with her hair, and went to slicing tomatoes.

"This is great," Collins exclaimed in the most drab tone. "Now, I can help you guys move ahead with diversity engineering. It's truly revolutionized Martian cityscaping. We've gone from rocket capsule boomtowns to thriving municipalities with burgeoning ecologies almost overnight."

"This isn't genetic modification, is it?" Siggy raised only her eyes to look into him. "I worked too hard on getting things just right, seeds from museums and labs and everything, to mess it up with any divergent DNA--"

"Relax, Miss Soltero."

"Siggy. You're familia, Collins. It's been years, and you've been nothing but great to me."

"Friends it is." He raised a glass of red wine for a silent toast.

"Not friends. Familia. You are family. We are family. In the blood. Got it? From now on, you're boricua, Puerto Rican. Never let anybody put it or us down."

"Okay, sure." He got neither the word nor the depth, but the serious eye from his pal Alec informed Collins the matter was one from the heart. "I'll, uh, I won't let you down."

She waved the knife at him. "Good. I expect nothing less. Now, eat. You're way too skinny."

"So, Alec is familia too, huh?" Collins grabbed a plate and got to loading it up. Workers out front smelled the banquet and started coming inside.

Siggy looked at Alec. He smiled at her. She blushed again. "Yeah. He's familia. Extra close familia." Her hip jutted out. She went back to slicing.

"So, about the diversity engineering. The work you've done here is beyond phenomenal, but what if I told you guys you could alter the soil on a grander scale? Say, from orbit using a satellite..."

FOREST SIZE: 50.32 hectares [124.34 acres]

May

2111

"Siggy!" Hold on!" Alec felt sure his muscles were going to tear. Between the wind and the downpour, one arm on the scooter and the other clinging to a branch, he said a prayer. He was blinded and exhausted and going down. Surely, this was the end.

The lightning storm came forty minutes earlier, a hot mass of meteorological hatred that had already flooded out ten cities along its destructive easterly path. The ninth Category Five storm over Europe this season, cause of more homelessness and economic collapse than the Blizzard of 2109, climate change working harder than anyone else on Earth. Fires were abundant, and the secondary Black Forest was not immune. Before the rain came, five heavenly bolts ignited the northwest corridor. A third of the Black Forest up in smoke.

They wasted no time getting to the heart of the blaze. Fire hovercraft. Hoses. Sand fans. The plan worked well.

Then came the deluge.

Now, Alec held the scooter as Siggy hung off of it over the side of the artificial cliff they had engineered two years ago.The cliff was now a waterfall, and weary Alec waited. What else could he do? Drop the woman and run? Not now. Not after what had happened six hours earlier.

"Did you just say...?"

Siggy grinned. "Yes. I said yes, I'll marry you, 'youngling'."

He knew the deluge would reach them, take out his feet and it would all be over. Drenched, terrified and yet ready for death. "Siggy! Let go!"

"What!" She wished she hadn't heard the madness.

He looked back. Here it came. "Now! Let go and hold your--"

He lost all sense of direction. A split second to catch a breath. Warm water around his body. Clothing tugged. Pockets violated. The concentration of trees, a plan dug in long ago, meant they didn't travel so far after plunging off the side. They splashed down into a pool and soon were hung out on branches like discarded polymer bags. Devoid of energy. Lifeless.

Up above, the lightning knew no end. Nature, so reassuring these last eight years of plenty, now backhanded them. Uncaring. Thoughtless. Slap. Kill. Have a nice day. Moving on.

Move on it did, eager to take a bite out of Mother Russia. The storm subsided over their heads. The land dried out. Fires stalled. Workers fanned out, found Alec and Siggy, half dead, barely aware. They were airlifted to Crossroads of Peace Medical Center in Holland. A lung infection for Alec and three broken fingers. Hairline fracture in the lumbar spine. For Siggy, surgery to replace a ruptured spleen.

They returned to Forestburg weeks later. The rowhouses were intact. The forest? It bore the appearance of a middle-aged green man with a blackened bald spot on the top of his head. But two thirds of it remained. Waterlogged. Over a hundred trees blown over or with snapped limbs. Soil washed away. But there she was. Black Forest. Sucking up carbon dioxide. Exhaling oxygen. Scarred beauty.

Every night of their rehabilitation, Alec and Siggy sat on the porch, shaded by a translucent force field to keep out the many bugs. They soaked in a therapeutic spa, holding hands, taking in the sight of their equally battered handiwork, joking about aging before their respective times. They, with the trees, sighed.

FOREST SIZE: 38.9 hectares [96.12 acres]

December

2111

"Casiguaya Soltero-Siefer!" The holographic announcer, a burly guy with muttonchops and an old school fedora, sang out the final syllable as Siggy, in a tight tangerine satin dress with cutaway holes at the abdomen and back, stepped out to head for the stage. Alec clapped harder than anyone else here in this brand new amphitheater built in Tunis, Tunisia. Thousands were applauding his wife.

She tiptoed up the steps, thanked the holographic host, and accepted the spiralled gold award with the Earth atop. Siggy gazed at it. A Lifetime Achievement enhancement. Awards didn't mean a thing. At least, they never did until she held one in her hand. Hers. Theirs. Europe's. It could not just be hers.

"Thank you. Thank you very much." She waited until the tumult died down. "I...I want to thank all the people over the last decade who made the Black Forest the biggest, densest forest in Europe." They went wild again as she jumped up and down onstage. "Really. I mean, I felt from the start it would never get as big as it has. But now, with the Union and the Asian Alliance putting it in their budgets, and with further help from the African Union, we can't be stopped!"

The crowd lost its collective mind again. Green was back, and bigger than ever. Mankind was shaking off its industrialized terror of tree sap and slithering snakes. It only took global famine, nuclear bombings, the loss of twenty major cities and a billion deaths, but the message was coming in soft and somewhat clear. Get your collective butt in gear.

"Listen, you guys," she waved her hands to quiet the throng. "Listen," she stifled a cry, "a long time ago, well, not so long really, my bisabuelo told me about Hurricane Maria. She came in a year of three big mothers like herself, and one in Ireland. We find it common now, yeah? But then, they were still arguing the climate like they had all the time in the world, you know? Like, we weren't going to be born and have to endure it, so there was no impetus to affect change or put people first. But here we are. We're the dying and diseased and depraved generations after the debates. We're the Post-Profit children of the apocalypse they said would come for ages but never changed a single thing to even stall it. Am I preaching? Yes. because I have this award in my hand and I own the stage right now! Because I have to accept this and think about the sadness in my bisabuelo's face when he used to talk, the people swept away to die from floods and fires and revolutions. Remember on the news when some of us my age were kids, and they showed the forklifts shoving bodies off of Victoria Falls? See? I can't not forget those things. They don't depress me. They don't own me. I won't let them. But, I have to recall their faces so I can plant the next tree, so I can plot the next set of coordinates in the satellite to make a new square mile of fertile land. Yeah." Siggy wiped a stream of tears away she just realized were running rampant down her face. "So, thank you, Collins McKay, mi hermano. Thank you, Infozerk for all you do and innovate daily. Thank you to my husband, Alec Siefer, the laid back guy in the white suit, row three, fourth chair from the right. Yes, you!" The spotlight fell on Alec. Our blood, our sweat, our unity is in Germany. Thank you."

She walked off the stage to uproarious applause here in the splendor of a rejuvenated Africa. Ten years done. Siggy knew she could go back up to Orbital Station Unity. But her old student Cindi had been doing wonders with the place, so she heard.

Forestburg. I need to heal your wound. Hmm. What can I do with another ten years' time?

July

2121

He came on foot, deciding to enjoy the scenic view. A pleasant garden. The beauteous stream with the many wooden bridges, young lovers holding hands. He tried to find where it happened, where his college professors said the last war made Germany not unlike the surface of the Moon. But, nothing. He heard the stream had been diverted here, but it appeared as natural as any other. People worked tirelessly to plant flowers, measure tree thicknesses, set up another bee colony. From one end of this new town to the other, the young man found a place that, though recent, might as well be best described as 'lived in'.

He found her and the man on their knees, deep in the seemingly old forest. A path only as wide as a human body meandered through the thickest stuff he'd ever encountered. He swatted away mosquitoes, flies. He watched them as they returned a star-nosed mole into the ground with care.

"Ahem! Excuse me. Are you Casiguaya Soltero-Siefer?" He tapped a light circle on his wrist to pop up her ID and name, make sure he said it right.

Siggy turned about, her graying hair reflecting what little sunshine peeked between the foliage. "Yes. This is my husband, Alec." They paused. In the brush, a few healthy elk strode by. All three took the time to admire them.

"Yes. Ah, my name is Sigurd Printz. I am a representative for the Preservationist Society of Easter Island."

"Uh-oh," Alec scratched his thinning hair. "I sense a tinge of the familiar."

Siggy grinned. "Wait. Let's see. You want me to take up restoring the old growth forest La Isla de Pascuas had before the Rapa Nui people cut it down?"

"Yes. It's an effort underwritten by an international group. It took a lot of debate. Shame really. On the Moon and Mars, people in closed domes value nature because outside the walls is a lifeless void. Here, no matter how much was lost..."

Husband and wife eyed one another.

"Relax, youngling," Siggy rose up, a brief groan from stiffening joints. "I love a challenge. No need for the hard sell. Alec, mind if I take a ten-year vacation?"

"Ten years? Really? That's all it would take?" The young guy was practically ecstatic.

"Why not?" asked Alec. "You've done nothing around here but lounge around." He shared a laugh with his wife and kissed her on the forehead. "I know how to keep myself occupied. Go turn that place into a lost world."

She went. She did just that.

FOREST SIZE: 908 hectares [2,243.72 acres]

October

2161

( ...in other news, the latest space flight taking new colonists to Mars features a newcomer, a scrappy barber from the Khartoum region of Sudan named Ake. Ake plans to open his own shop, and show those clinical Martian cities how to liven up the place...)

Aged one hundred and three. It happened then.

Her remains, ashes in a biodegradable kit, went into the ground. Over it, Alec put his old hands to use planting the young elm. He and the staff, twenty thousand strong now, upheld the last request of Casiguaya Soltero-Siefer:

No eulogy, please. No tears either. If you have never done so in your life, take this time at my grave to done one thing and one thing only.

Vive. Live. Breathe in slow and out slower. Let the peace fill your lungs. Smell the leaves as they grow and die and fall. Hear the birds speak a thousand dialects. Enjoy the dirt on your hands. You are the world. I mean not the filthy, political, selfish part we know. I mean this quiet one, the Utopia all around we walk over, where worms play gleefully and chipmunks giggle. In a minute of time you can crawl inside of it and lose yourself to it, no charge. Just take this quiet and kiss it. Please. Te amo.

They did. As Alec sobbed, tens of thousands in person, via hologram and watching on colonies on two other worlds and a space station breathing oxygen from trees this woman planted quelled their inner voices for one minute.

As the chaotic highways of their minds subsided, forests grew within them.

BLACK FOREST SIZE: 4,000 square kilometers