Welcome back to the Atlas, and to the deepening mystery of “Deciduous and Evergreen.” In our last dispatch, the world was shaken by a cryptic broadcast from a voice calling itself the Architect. The game, it seems, has begun. Today, we pick up in the immediate, tense aftermath as our three estranged friends, Eleanor, Brodie, and Liam, try to process the impossible, each through the lens of their own deeply held beliefs. The prophecy is no longer history; it is an alive and terrifying reality.
Previously:
Part 002: The Prophecy Reborn
Eleanor was still fuming. Ten minutes later, the sheer, unadulterated cheek of her brother still burned. She was walking through the old town trying to regain her composure after he had nearly knocked her over, and she was struck by the contrast of her emotions: elation for her performance at the debate, fear of the injury she narrowly avoided, embarrassment as people stopped to stare at her while she fished her books out of the street gutter, and rage at the injustice of having been so high, and then suddenly so low. She found that she had retreated into the old town, walking down a small winding alley. It was quieter here, and less busy. The walls that surrounded her muffled the sounds of the outside world and she found it oddly comforting, much to her annoyance. The whimsical nature of the old town with its twists and turns had always annoyed her.
A flash of a memory raced past her mind’s eye, of her, Liam, and Brodie as kids running through some of the Closes and making up ghost stories. ‘Okay, maybe it hadn’t always annoyed her’, she thought to herself.
Eleanor found one of those Closes now, the bakehouse close, and sat down on the steps that led up to a small wooden door behind her. This Close was particularly spectacular, with a tall building at one end that had an arched alleyway running underneath the length of it. She preferred the elegance of the Georgian buildings on the other side of town. But part of her admired the audacity of this particular alleyway to just plunge through a building with no thought.
Pulling out her pad, she started absent-mindedly flicking through her notes and charts from the debate earlier. The familiar numbers, words, well researched arguments were a balm to her frayed nerves. She sighed a big sigh of relief at the familiarity and rested her cheek against the stone wall beside her. Its cool touch was soothing, and she closed her eyes for a moment to relish it, letting her pad rest in her lap. Her mind went to her brother, and she wondered when he had gone so wayward. They had been close once, and she missed him, despite how much of a prick he had grown up to be.
***
Brodie relaxed into his favourite chair in the kitchen. It’s the kind of chair that has whole chunks taken out of the stuffing by various cats, it’s the kind of chair that has colours in the lining that were not originally there. A deeply loved chair. A long in the tooth chair. And it was perhaps one of the comfiest places on earth, at least according to Brodie. The chair was in the kitchen, which had been the traditional heart of his home for his entire life, with people always coming and going. It was lined by huge windows on two sides that looked out into their roof garden, and because of it, there was always a pleasant aroma of herbs and damp earth that mingled with whatever happened to be cooking away on the stove. Today his grandmother was cooking a root and squash soup, one of his favourites, and Brodie was peeling Thyme leaves from the stems to both go in the soup, and be sprinkled on top as a garnish. The ambience was amplified further by the gentle murmur of his grandma who sometimes had the habit of stirring the pot in time with whatever old Scottish song was in her head that day. Brodie, recognising the melody, jumped in from time to time with the counter melody. It was a song he had heard a few times before, traditionally played with a fiddle and flute that would weave sounds in and around each other to sound like the weather as it battered the west coast. The radio, an old thing from decades ago, held together by tape and insistence, was on the windowsill playing a segment about the recent football transfers. His interest had little to do with sport, but it made his grandmother happy to have it playing anyway, just for the background murmur of voices, and the unspoken hope that they might hear something from the architect again.
***
Liam pounded the keys of the console as hard as he could, button bashing had secured him the last two wins, but finally one of his friends had de-throned him. The character he had chosen laid on the floor, energy deserted, and health bar reduced to zero. He had always loved this game, a classic from a time long before any nonsense. It was called Tekken, and it was older than even his grandparents. A remnant of a time when people seemed less bogged down by all the misery of the world. The whole arcade and bar was almost a temple to him. There were games that spanned decades, all blaring out music, colour and light that bounced around the arches underneath Waverly Station. The smell of stale beers, flavoured smokes, and energy drinks was in abundance, and all around was a pulsing wave of new EDM. That last part was his personal highlight. EDM was a music trend that had died off a few decades ago, to be replaced with dreary melancholy and AI generated crap. In the last few years, a few older guys in the scene were starting to revive it, and he was hooked. It was hedonistic, rapturous, and alive in a way that he couldn’t quite explain. There had been times when he had been on that dancefloor, full of MDMA, feeling like there was nothing else in the world but the dance and the dancers.
His friend patted him on the back and reminded him jokingly to be ‘less fucking useless at Tekken next time’. He smiled and punched his friend on the arm, and then they headed over to the bar to grab another beer.
***
The cool stone was soothing to Eleanor, and she felt quite grounded again after the incident earlier. Opening her eyes again, she found the Close still empty. The sound of vehicles was muted by the buildings, and the towering walls felt like they were holding her. Suddenly she noticed a flicker of light and looked down at her lap. Her pad was there still displaying the notes from her debate. Had she imagined it, that little play of light, or was her pad about to give up the ghost? Picking it up she held it close to her ear and listened. The usual background hum of electricity and the faint thrum of a harddrive, but then something else appeared and startled her. A laugh…
In her fright she dropped the pad on the stone floor at the bottom of the steps, thankful that it hadn’t smashed. But something was off. The pads light had changed to a blue tone, and was bathing the Close in a cold light. It seemed to grow brighter somehow, and then the notes that had been there on the screen previously dissolved into a static that seemed to shift and move, almost like watching leaves blown in a wind. A sound filled the space, the sound of a breeze, though there was none, and the buildings that had just moments ago felt comforting, suddenly loomed in the light. She visibly shook in her anxiety. It couldn’t be!
***
The light outside seemed to have dimmed in the last 5 minutes Brodie noticed. It was suddenly getting harder for him to see exactly what he was doing with the chopping up of the pumpkin. Scottish weather had always amazed him, with its ability to play around with varying seasons, sometimes in the span of a few hours. What had been a foggy day already was suddenly becoming very overcast as well. He put down the knife on the old oak table and grabbed the arms of his comfy armchair to spin it towards the window so he could see better. The scraping of the chairs legs as he spun it around on the tiled floor drew his grandmother’s attention and she gasped. But when he turned to raise his eyebrows at her, she wasn’t looking at him at all. She was staring at the radio, wooden spoon in hand. He started to notice it too, another sound was in the room. It felt as though it was nearly coming out of the walls themselves. The sound was of a faint breeze. The radio crackled and the football news faltered to be replaced with a little hiss, like the sound that is made when wind passes through the boughs of trees.
Brodie’s grandmother’s spoon clattered to the floor, leaving a large soupy stain where it rattled the tiles. She ran to the door, shouting down the stairs to the rest of his family, and indeed to the other families that lived in the building.
“IT’S HIM!”
***
As Liam grabbed his beer from the counter he proffered his card and tapped it on the device, but the bar man looked quizzical.
“Sorry pal, the machine seems to be down again, have ya got cash?”
Liam rifled through his pockets looking for anything, but there was nothing to be found. He hadn’t used cash since he was a kid. Looking up to shrug at the barman, he noticed something had changed. The barman himself was looking over his shoulder. The light in the room was different too. He turned around and all the games consoles had gone blank and were showing an odd static screen which had strange little wiggly lines all over it. The dance music had ceased, and instead there was a sound that reminded him of falling rocks as if heard from a great distance. For a moment he was confused, the cogs of his mind pouring over the details that all felt strangely familiar, but then he remembered it was nearly Halloween. He nudged his friends arm,
“Mate, this is just another one of those viral marketing things ya see all the time, quick, grab your phone, let’s record it and get on the bandwagon”.
He plunged his hands into his trouser pockets and grabbed his device, one of those new ultra thin phones that were translucent. He went to hold it up and begin recording, when he noticed it too was static, and across its faintly glowing surface was a pattern of slowly moving lines, like digital veins pulsing just beneath the glass.
“What the…”
A thunderous sound pierced the low rumble,
The broadcast began with a quiet hijacking of every single device in the room. All the screens flickered to an image of a single, golden autumn leaf turning slowly in a black void. The sound was like a soft, rustling breeze. Then, a voice appeared, a near-whisper, and yet at the same time, huge! The very walls themselves seemed to speak with this voice that could have come from the bowels of the earth, ancient and intimate.
It started with a soft giggle that chimed like icicles, and cracked like a glacier.
“Hello again.
Did you miss me?
I gave you such a long, lovely summer to play. Sixty years to listen to the wind. Sixty years for the story to sink deep into your soil.”
***
Eleanor’s first reaction was a sharp, involuntary gasp. She tasted the metallic tang of pure adrenaline in the back of her throat as her fight or flight response kicked in. Startled, and her heart hammering against her ribs, she almost ran away from the tablet. The sudden, aggressive hijack of her personal device in this isolated space felt like a physical attack. She pressed herself back against the stone, eyes wide, scanning the empty alley for anything that might explain this. She noticed her breaths were drawing in deep swathes of cold air and she felt that tightness, the same one she used to feel as a child when a panic attack was about to start. Terrified, she started scanning the alley. ‘Five things I can see… Four things I can hear… Three things I can feel,’ she whispered to herself, trying to ground herself once more, but it was so hard when that voice, that awful awful voice filled up the entire space!
“I have watched you, my little seedlings. You have grown so very tall. Some of you put down deep roots, it is true... but so many more have grown thorny and brittle, chasing a sun of your own making and forgetting the earth that feeds you. You learned all the wrong lessons from the light.”
***
Brodie’s family and even some of the other families in his community were all crowded into the kitchen. The sound of the Architect seemed to come not just from the speakers, but from the wind whistling in the chimney. The intrusion felt ancient and elemental, a voice of nature speaking through modern devices, the radio, peoples phones, his grandmother’s e-reader where her soup recipe had just been.
Brodie looked at the mixture of faces in the room, all showing different emotions. Some were scared. Others looked almost reverent. It had been his community’s opinion for a long while that the architect’s first prophecy had not been a stunt, and now here he was again. Pride began to straighten their spines and light a glow of certainty behind their eyes. Suddenly, after all these years of living a more natural lifestyle, they were going to be vindicated.
“You’ve had your season. You have run all through the garden, making your beautiful, clever, fragile things.
But the air is growing crisp now. The year is turning. And the sorting song has had a long, deep nap... it is waking again, and it is starting to remember its tune.”
***
Liam walked about the bar, looking into all the screens, fascinated. Odd, ethereal shapes—like swirling leaves or mycelial networks—formed and dissolved in the digital static. It and himself seemed to be the only two things in the room that were moving. Everyone else was frozen in what appeared to be fear. Liam wasn’t scared though, this seemed fun. It seemed like a great piece of marketing for something… he just couldn’t figure out what it was for, or who commissioned it. The strange voice continued…
“It’s a song about trees, I think you all need to listen to it. Are you ready to hear it?
I promise you, it is going to be DECIDEDLY wonderful!
It is time for a deep-clean, it’s time to decide, will you be deciduous or evergreen.”
The screens all went dark and a faint, sharp scent of ozone, like the air after a lightning strike, emanated from the overloaded electronics.The sound of the rustling breeze intensified for a moment, and then it was gone, and all about the room everything settled into a profound silence. The crowd of revellers looked absolutely stunned.
Liam got up onto the stage at the end of the room, and grabbed a microphone.
“A song, aye? Sounds like a fuckin’ great excuse for an end-o’-the-world party, troops!” Liam’s voice cut through the tense quiet of the room like a laser, and his laugh echoed down the wire, as if to laugh in the face of the architect.
Liam’s enthusiasm didn’t carry to the rest of the city though. Eleanor and Brodie both heard the same final breath of wind, like a leaf falling, and so did the rest of the world. Everything in Edinburgh had gone dark. Cars and buses stopped and stalled in the streets, with people gormlessly wondering how to get home. Digital billboards went black. Every electronic device in every home throughout the entire world was devoid of life for the next 12 hours.
The next morning Eleanor woke to find her phone had rebooted, and was pinging her incessantly with notification after notification from social media, news outlets, friends, family. The whole world was typing furiously and her phone was exploding under the weight of it.
The Prophecy Discussed
The harsh artificial glare of television studio lights shone down on Eleanor from the high up ceiling of the Edinburgh Assembly rooms. Its grandiose setting hinted at its past as a ballroom, but now it was to be the setting of her greatest test yet. The BBC had been one of the first networks to reach out to her. Her dad, the famous professor who had stood for the scientific explanation of the original prophecy, was no longer around, and they needed someone to be the voice of reason. The memory of him showed itself on her face in the form of an anguished grimace, it suggested a wish that he was still there, and that he could do this talk instead.
The low, anxious murmur of the crowd brought her back into the moment. She looked into the assembled gathering and, despite its size, she saw her mum right away, sitting there proudly. Liam was not with her though. Scanning further, she noted him near the back, seemingly disinterested in anything going on, and looking at his phone. Brodie, she noted, was there too. He represented another sharp pain in her chest that she had to push down.
The stark polished lectern at the front of the stage, beset by cameras, stood as the final hurdle. It was up to her to try and settle the mood. The last two days had been intense as the world had woken up to its new reality. The city she called home was on edge. Just this afternoon she had passed by a number of new pieces of frankly unhinged graffiti.
The producer for the BBC gave her the nod, and she walked forward to the lectern. The crowd’s hum slowly turned to tense silence. She moved composedly, authoritatively. The dry paper taste of anxiety in her mouth was only visible to her. She had to make her dad proud. This was her moment. The camera lights turned green. She was on air and the world was watching.
Over the next hour Brodie watched as Eleanor deftly explained away the entire event. He was so impressed with her, despite their contentious difference of opinion. He always knew she would be destined for greatness, and the way she calmly and brilliantly presented the official explanation was testament to his belief in her.
There had been a sophisticated, coordinated cyber-attack using deep-fake audio and quantum hacking she suggested. She showed people her data charts, and spellbound the audience with her clear logic, her cool demeanor. She was convincing, Brodie had to admit, and as he looked around, he could see it was working on other people too. The tension in the room had been reflective of the tension in the city. You could even smell it, the faint collective scent of nervous sweat from the audience. But now, people were visibly relaxing despite the hard plastic of the auditorium seats; they wanted to believe her.
Brodie watched her more closely and could see she was starting to believe in herself too. This is what she had always wanted, a rational orderly world, and to perpetuate the belief that any problem was an issue of mind over matter. Her stance grew stronger, and her animated face had transformed into a quietly confident, and even slightly upbeat demeanour.
The bulk of the talk was done, and a second person came on stage, a famous female presenter who normally did the 6 o’clock news. Her stern outfit spoke of someone who was used to being treated with deference, but on this stage it was clear the table had turned and she was paying a great deal of respect to Eleanor. Her questions started with the usual angle, to ask about how this worldwide hack could have been precipitated and forestalled. The answers were reasonable and considered. Eleanor believed that the original attack in 2025 had been the work of one of the first agentic general intelligence AI’s that had gone rogue. The technology back then had been far beyond what most humans knew was possible, and the subsequent anti AI legislation had slowed down our progress so that even now, this rogue AI was still out there and still well beyond our current means to detect. The questioning pushed harder on that and so began another long conversation about the ins and outs of whether we should or should not be using AI again. He had heard it all before, but for the audience at large, it was a level of nuance they were not used to.
For Brodie’s family, the frustration was palpable. They were what was colloquially known as hippies and wasters. People who denied progress due to a belief in Gaia. They lived according to the prophecy, believing that the message had been to encourage humans to become more at one with the planet.
Sadly Brodie and his community were much maligned because of that. They studied the prophecy just as much as Eleanor and her professor Dad had; they simply differed in one key distinction. For them, the prophecy was real. For Eleanor’s family, it was basically a very complex prank.
The audience questions and answers had now started and it was predictable. People wanted reassurances that they didn’t have to change their ways. That they weren’t bad people. No one was looking at the elephant in the room.
Brodie put up his hand and waited patiently. Eventually the microphone came to him, and Eleanor on the stage became visibly stiff.
“Hey, Eleanor, it’s Brodie.” He exclaimed awkwardly. He was not designed for this kind of exchange.
“Umm, so I guess what I wanted to know is, what should we do if the threat is actually more real than is being suggested here. Like, I get it, maybe it was an AI from the 20s or, whatever. But, I mean, if it can arrest such a degree of control over everything we have that is an electronic device. Shouldn’t we actually acknowledge what it says? Maybe we do need to change our ways?”.
Eleanor sighed, as she looked out across the crowd at her old friend she found a knot in her throat that was stirring up a war inside of her. Conflicting emotions to be kind to her old friend weighed up against her triumph tonight in making the reality of the situation clear. Brodie’s whole life he had been a part of that weird social movement. They believed the answers to the prophecy were in living like our near-ancient ancestors. Perhaps it was time to put that nonsense to bed. Her empathy waned in the light of this new conviction and she began her response. The physical distance, and her relative elevation on the stage gave her the strength she needed to confront this once and for all.
“The data is unequivocal on this question. After the first prophecy, effective climate solutions were stalled for decades as wars were fought and fanatical solutions were proposed over sensible planning. It has taken us decades again for humans to recover from that, and in the meantime we have breached at least two of the climate tipping points that were predicted in the early 2000’s. In the meantime, we have seen that the free market and democracy have been better predictors of human behavioral change, than, say, a religious belief in the prophecy coming true.”
Eleanor could see already that the last sentence had landed just as expected.The vast majority of people agreed with her, but there was a small enclave of the population who still had a whimsical notion of the prophecy. People who legitimately believed it to be real. Supernatural mysterious silliness. Brodie’s family were clearly affronted by what she had said, and for a moment she flushed red, shocked at the thought that she might have hurt her old friend. A memory of being cooked food by his mum in their oldy-worldy kitchen swam up in her vision.
A hot flush of anger crept up Brodie’s neck. That she wouldn’t even soften the blow, wouldn’t even dance with her words to be kind, that was the deepest cut..
“Would you not say that the fact we have already surpassed THREE of the climate tipping points the Paris agreement spoke about, shows that maybe the architect understood humans better than any ‘data’. That we have already broken our pact with nature and that logic based solutions haven’t worked?”
“Fear is understandable,” she says patronizingly, “but it’s not data. If we are going to move on from this, we need to work together using an evidence based approach to being more in accord with nature” Indicating to the roving mic, she moved on to the next person with a raised hand. She had humiliated him with her faux compassion. The audience, however, were relieved to have had their fears dismissed so calmly, as if they were, after all, completely unfounded. They were applauding her. Most were at least. Brodie and his community sat sullen and still, feeling like dismissed children.
Eventually the broadcast ended and Eleanor was set about by reporters from all corners of the globe. The room was abuzz with languages and translators all speaking into dictaphones and down camera lenses to share what Eleanor had said. Eleanor herself was surrounded by them, as well as grateful officials, and even, Brodie noted, the two princes from the old Royal family. Brodie looked towards her, a final hope passing across his chest that maybe she might look his way, and acknowledge his hurt. But it was not to be. She was the star of the show, and she had won. He turned to leave with everyone else. As he shuffled out, he noticed by the door, leaning against the wall with a few of his friends was Liam. They met eyes for a second, and once again Brodie hoped that he might find some solace in the eyes of an old friend. Liam, however, smirked and turned away, laughing with his friends.
Brodie walked back home, feeling utterly alone for the first time in years.
And so the stage is set. In the wake of a global event that has shattered the world’s sense of order, Eleanor has chosen to armor herself in logic, Brodie has retreated to the certainty of his faith, and Liam has met the abyss with a defiant laugh. Each has been pushed to the extremes of their nature, and the chasm between them has never been wider. The world is watching, waiting for an explanation, and it is Eleanor who has stepped into the spotlight to provide one. But as old friends become public adversaries, the Architect’s sorting song has truly begun.
Now, I turn to you.
When faced with a crisis or the unknown, which of these three reactions do you recognize most in yourself? Do you, like Eleanor, seek a rational explanation? Do you, like Brodie, lean on your intuition and beliefs? Or do you, like Liam, choose to dance in the face of uncertainty?
I’m fascinated to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Loving how this builds tension through three totally different worldviews colliding! The pacing works fantastically here, and I just continue to love this concept of the haunting refrain - “will you be deciduous or evergreen”. So poetic. The worldbuilding feels huge, and you're pulling it off beautifully.