Welcome back to the Atlas, friends.
In our last dispatch, a mysterious broadcast from the Architect shattered the world’s sense of normalcy. A cryptic promise was made: a “sorting song” was waking.
Today, we live the morning after. We rejoin Eleanor, Brodie, and Liam as they wake up to a world that is... different. The old maps of logic are beginning to tear, and the impossible is bleeding into the familiar streets of Edinburgh. The time for debate is over. The time for consequences has begun.
Previously:
Act II: The Rising Dread
The Prophecy Whispers
Eleanor woke up the next morning in her parents’ house. Her mum still kept her bedroom made up for her, even though Eleanor had moved out to her University halls. At first she had resented her mum for doing this, but in hindsight, she had found that the longer she was away, the more she craved being at home. It was a comfortable space in a large sandstone Georgian town house on Heriot row. Her bedroom was on the top floor and overlooked a beautiful cobbled street and a small garden opposite that was private for the residents. It was, in short, rather luxurious, and an awful lot better for creature comforts than her halls of residence.
Lying in bed she looked up at the ceiling and the usual familiar patterns that the sun made as it crept across her ceiling from the gap just above her drawn curtains. Ever the analyst, she had spent time as a child with her dad mapping the pattern the sun made on her ceiling each morning at a certain time, as it peered through that small crack at the top of the curtain rail, and now with a quick glance at the painted lines on her ceiling she could tell with a degree of accuracy both the time and the month. She didn’t need it today though. Her triumph last night meant that the date would forever be etched in her mind. She had gone to the stage on October 27th. Her new mental calendar for a while would likely be measured by that date, and so today was the 28th, one day after she had addressed the entire world on TV.
Sucking in a thick, deep breath, Eleanor rolled over and decided that, given the circumstances, she could this once treat herself to a lie-in. Rolling over and tucking her arms under the cold part of her pillow she settled in to relax and attempt a little snooze, but as her eyes drifted, so did her mind, and slowly it settled onto that image of her old friend Brodie in the crowd looking upset. At the time she had been on such a high, the stage, the lights, the attention had been like a drug, but she had seen him as he left, looking dejected. Her heart filled with regret. A rich sense of wrongdoing began to work its way into the surface varnish of her perfect night. She rolled the other way hoping the movement might slosh her memories around to reveal something new. But he was still there. She grabbed her phone in frustration, still on airplane mode to avoid distractions, and played a guided meditation that she could drift off to. But even there Brodie was present.
“Next, we are going to do some Metta, also known as ‘loving-kindness’ practices. I want you to think of someone, it could be anyone in your life, and following the cadence of your breath, we are going to wish for the wellbeing of this person”.
“Bloody useless,” she muttered to herself, disappointed in the meditation, and disappointed that she seemed destined to not have the cosy lie-in she deserved without being accosted by her emotions.
Getting out of bed Eleanor pulled open her closet and grabbed her favourite gown, a thick woolly one that she had enjoyed since she was a young teen. The kind of gown that has gone flat from overuse, frayed at the edges, and a constant source of angst for any well-meaning mum. There was just something about it. Pulling it on over her pajamas, she wandered downstairs to the kitchen. It was still early and her mum hadn’t been up yet, and there was zero chance Liam would be awake for hours, as such the kitchen lay untouched from the night before, blinds drawn down over the windows, and just the illumination of a small electrical usage meter and the oven clock to define the room. Flicking on the corner lamp, she walked over and took a mug out of the orderly glass-panelled cupboard, rummaged around in a floor cabinet, and let her fingers settle on a bag of Peruvian beans. She loved the routine of grinding them, smelling them, running the coarse grains through her fingers, and then eventually tamping them down and letting that hot, steamy water run through it all, extracting that liquid heaven.
Slowly she made her way back upstairs again, letting the warmth permeate through the thick ceramic of her mug and into her cold fingertips. The hallway had a small collage of photo frames that followed you up the stairs, many of them containing pictures of her dad before he had passed. She thought about him a lot anyway, but this morning he felt especially close after she had succeeded in starting down the path he had carved for her, following in his footsteps. The thought of that fulfillment put a bit more spring in her step and she decided to get going on the day.
Sitting at her desk, she slowly got her things in order. The pile of books to the left were ordered in reading order, with little coloured sticky tabs marking pages of interest. She had poured a little water from her perfectly formed watering can into a small, tidy succulent bed. Her laptop was square in front of her, ready to begin when she opened it, and her coffee mug was steaming away just within reach. To complete the set, a pot of pencils and pens stood at the ready. She sighed at the calm and structure of it all. All that she needed now was a bit of morning light. Reaching to her right, she grabbed the curtain pull and gave it a tug, letting the thick drapes sweep to either side of the tall antique window.
Her face, full of expectant happiness at the hint of a sunny day, fell in shock. Her eyes focused in and out as if trying to find purchase on what she saw outside, but they were unable. The sounds outside were quiet, made even quieter by the contrast of her memories of tyres passing over the cobbles outside, as they normally would on a Tuesday, with early morning commuters going to work. In fact, the only sound was that of her laptop, slightly humming.
Nothing changed for a long moment as she stared and stared, a picture of utter disbelief slapped across her face. Slowly, her jaw started to work, and she began talking to herself. Small snatches of sentences formed and died in her mouth.
“No, couldn’t be… a prank maybe? No... Makes no sense…An art installation? A chemical attack? A TV show’s idea of a funny joke?” With each new thought born and dismissed in quick succession, her face grew more frantic, and she slowly leaned closer and closer to the cold glass panes, her breath fogging on the glass.
Brodie was already up and about on Calton Hill, at the national monument, a strange, half-finished memorial to fallen soldiers. At first glance, Brodie could well have been one of the mourners remembering the fallen dead. He was on his knees looking over the entire city, a tear rolling down one cheek. A leaf blew across the monument and landed near him, yellow with red on its tips, a maple leaf. He picked it up and examined it, his expression showing a strange mixture of profound terror and solemn awe filled reverence. It is the expression of someone who is not surprised, so much as just sad and disappointed. He had always been taught this day would come, and now that it was here, vindication felt hollow in his stomach, like an empty meal.
Eleanor, now so close to the glass of her bedroom window she was almost touching it, placed her hands gently on the panes to make sure that they at least were still real. As she looked out, she saw one of the strangest sights she had ever come across. Just last night, most of these trees, yellowing and autumnal looking, still had most of their leaves. Now, not a single leaf remained on a single tree. A thick, knee-deep blanket of foliage littered the ground. The trees, as far as the eye could see, were like skeletons, devoid of any flesh and muscle. Still alive, but just bare. Aside from how impossible all of this looked and felt, there was something else. The leaves were perfectly golden and red. They looked as though a brilliant photoshop editor had amped up the saturation over the entirety of her visual reality. When she looked even closer, gazing at the street and the gardens below, wiping away the steam from her breath on the window pane, she could almost believe that the fallen leaves were glowing in a soft pulsating pattern. Like a subtle heartbeat.
Her hand shook as she reached over without averting her eyes to where her phone sat on her desk. She fumbled with it and turned on the Wi-Fi, and within a couple of seconds she was getting notifications in endless streams. Not only of her TV appearance last night, but of a sudden global event being desperately reported across all channels.
Every leaf, in every town, in every country, in every corner of the world had seen its trees drop all their leaves at exactly the same time. Some mobile videos showed the moment in impossible clarity, with a mighty whoosh as thick clouds of green suddenly turned to gold and tumbled to the floor. The continent, the season, the environment, it didn’t matter. From Edinburgh to the Amazon rainforest, every deciduous tree stood naked, leaving only the coniferous forests intact. And in every leaf pile, there was a slow steady pulsing glow. Perfectly synced across the entire planet.
Just fifteen minutes had passed and Eleanor, now in her warmest clothes, bustled through the city, hood up and head down, desperate to not be recognised. Her clean orderly house had been the final refuge, and stepping over its boundary had taken everything. Now she was outside, she could not deny it or pretend. Her feet swept through massive piles of leaves that drifted about in little breezes, cluttering curbs, packing up against walls and railings, and covering the streets. There was a deep unnatural silence everywhere, broken only by the sound of a person waking up to the same shock and terror as she had felt.
As she walked through the new town, she noticed abandoned cars in the streets where people had clearly gotten out and ran away. Perhaps drivers in the night who had suddenly been overwhelmed by the deluge. She could see them in her mind’s eye, shocked and scared, panicking into the night. A stray dog on the corner of one of the gardens pawed at the leaves and sniffed them, confused and wary. Birds sat up in the limbs of the suddenly naked trees, glaring down at the ground in judgement. The few people she did see out and about mirrored her shock and disbelief. She feigned urgency and refused eye contact with anyone.
Crossing over Princes street into the old town made the feeling even worse. Statues in building facades loomed over her, looking down in disappointment. Thick syrupy condensation rolled down walls from the released humidity of an infinite amount of organic matter now being crushed in the streets and beginning its slow decline into leaf-litter. To her hollowed out eyes, it appeared as though the buildings wept. Droplets left tracks in the dust and grime, like tears that rolled down a dusty cheek. The sudden change into the unorganised streets and leering buildings felt apt. Her head felt like it was shattering. Her clearly defined world of reason and logic had been blown away in one fell swoop, and the old town reflected the disarray. The absolute lunacy of a world that seemed to have no rules.
Brodie’s grandmother saw her coming, and was not surprised. She had expected it. Today, her beliefs, her nightmares had finally come true, and Eleanor would no doubt be the first of many who came to seek solace from her wisdom and understanding of the prophecy. Getting up out of her chair and onto shaky knees, she made her way down the stairs and waited by the door for the inevitable knock. Five seconds passed before it came, pleasingly accurate in its timing. The knock uttered a shrill tapping against the wood that sounded meek and scared in the long hallway. She pulled open the door and stood in front of Eleanor, arms crossed. Blocking the way that led to her warm, inviting home. She had stoked the fireplace as she had passed just to make sure the effect was not diminished.
Despite her vindication though, she was not a bad person, and underneath her anger at this young girl, she could also see someone who was scared and who didn’t understand. She stood and wordlessly waited for Eleanor to say something, a disappointed expression lingering between them. Eleanor, flustered, looked about frantically and pulled back her hood.
“Um, hey, Mrs. Wilson. Is… is Brodie there?”
“The world finally shows ye a truth ye cannae measure, and now ye come here” Eleanor was taken aback and scrambled for words.
“After what ye did tae him? Tae all of us??”
Eleanor tried to apologize, but Brodie’s grandmother held up a hand, not to be trifled with. “He’s no’ here. He’s away. On the Hill.”
And with that she held Eleanor’s gaze, and slowly, carefully closed the door, never once breaking eye contact with her. She wanted to hold her eyes as long as possible, to really let that message sink in. The door closed further and the last thing she saw in the crack between the door and the wall was a young girl looking visibly shaken with a small tear rolling down her cheek.
For a moment she rested with her back to the wall and breathed a conflicted sigh. Her heart wrestled with the idea of reaching out to her, to open the door again and comfort that poor kid, but no! Tough love. Sometimes people only learnt what was important the hard way. If she made it back here, she would be welcome, until then, she had some making up to do. Silly girl.
Eleanor, with her hood back up, walked through the town to Calton Hill. Of course he was there, she shouldn’t have expected anything less. Her walk was purposeful, but stilted, and every now and again she stopped in a doorway to catch her breath and brush her face with her hoodie sleeves. This feeling, she mused, was like being back in year 7 again. She was small, and inconsequential. The only use people had found for her back then had been to treat her differently because of her geekiness and her famous dad. As she stood now, she stood just like that year 7 had done, shoulders half hunched as if to be smaller and less visible. It worked, because people walked right past her without showing any recognition, despite having only been on their screens less than 12 hours before. Though at the time, she had been wearing a smart suit and with crisp, polished hair. Now she was in her casual leg warmers and a big hoodie from the back of her wardrobe.
As she approached the base of the hill, she was doubly shocked at how thick the leaves were here. The trees all around the base of the hill were tall, naked and silent, and the climb up the path towards the monument was akin to wading through thick mud. The whole thing felt impossible, and yet hauntingly beautiful too. The leaves were violent shades of gold and glowed faintly, it was surreal, and enticing. She found that if she was able to let her mess of a brain calm down for a moment, she was nearly able to admire it. As the hill got higher and steeper, her breath came in shorter, sharper breaths, and she rubbed her thighs from time to time, unused as they were to this much strain. Desk work didn’t often equate to leg work. Eleanor was not going to give up, however, something about this climb felt necessary. Not only did she need to find her friend, but she needed to feel something too. Aching legs were something tangible. Something real. In a world where everything she understood had suddenly flipped the table; it was that simple experience of pain that helped her stay calm.
Nearing the top, she saw him in the distance, standing between two of the great pillars of the Parthenon-styled monument, framed against the pale sky. He hadn’t noticed her, and instead seemed to be looking out across the city, his arms slightly apart and his fingers outspread, as if feeling for every breeze as it passed him by. She turned to look at his view, and the whole of Edinburgh was opened up, she could see it in detail, noticing that there were views she had never seen before now that all the trees were bare and revealing their hidden corners. Turning back to Brodie, she made her way over to the base a few meters below him. A sudden memory of the night before with her on the stage and Brodie below flashed across her mind. A jarring thought, and the irony was not lost on her. Pulling back her hood, and pawing at her hair, before finally wiping her cheeks once more with her sleeve, she looked up, and swallowed, not only her fear, but her pride.
“Brodie?” The wind threatened to rip her words away after how much they had cost her, but to her relief he seemed to hear, his head turning to her and their eyes meeting for the second time in the last twenty-four hours.
“Brodie,” she said, her voice cracking against the emotions. “You were right. I’m sorry. I don’t understand what’s happening. Im…” Her thoughts ran through all the permutations of what she could be: sorry, humbled, defenceless, in need of a hug. But the word that passed her lips before asking for permission sounded unlike any of those.
“I’m scared.”
Brodie looked down at her for a long uncomfortable moment as she stood and shivered. Like his grandmother, he lingered, slow and considered, before he gave a single, grave nod. A small admission of acceptance.
“I know,” he said, his voice quiet but clear in the wind. “So am I. Scared, that is. Come on up.”
He waited for her as she rounded the side of the building, and as she approached, he opened his arms to her, and she collapsed in them and cried. He cried too. Wind howled about them through the pillars of the temple-like structure, carrying away their sobs.
Had anyone walked past at that moment, they would have seen two people finding comfort in each other, standing atop a world that seemed to have turned its back on humanity once and for all. Their shape, a small bubble of warmth, and of rekindled faith, in a world that had gone resolutely cold and quiet.
A Note from the Atlas: This scene on Calton Hill is the heart turning point for me. Eleanor, stripped of her certainty, finally speaks the most basic, vulnerable truth: “I’m scared”. And Brodie meets her not with “I told you so,” but with “So am I”. In the middle of this impossible, world-shattering event, the most important thing becomes this simple, fragile human connection. It reminds me that even when the maps make no sense, finding your fellow explorers is everything. Writing this felt like coming home after being lost.
The Prophecy Chooses
The two pundits on CNN shouted over each other repeatedly, their voices turning into a tornado that swirled and raged, but made no attempt at clarity. The presenter between them, who also looked frayed and at a loss for what to do, eventually managed to wedge some words in between them and wrangle some sense from their two positions. The woman on the left was a famous political advisor who was advocating for a geo-engineering solution to the climate crisis, believing that if they could arrest the climate back into a normal range, they might avoid the prophecy. She proposed all sorts of solutions that ranged from fairly sensible to completely outlandish. From biochar which would be buried in soils, to phytoplankton blooms cultivated in the ocean, and even salt crystal generation in the clouds to increase their reflectivity. The man on the other side of the table hated all of these ideas. Aside from his belief that they represented environmental risks in their own right, he was still of the same mind and believed in the ideas that the now controversial Eleanor had shared, that this was the work of an extremely advanced AI. He proposed using the full might of the US military budget and expertise to scrape the world’s computers for any sign of this AI and wipe it out completely. He suggested that there was no need to respect borders or autonomy in this exercise, because the AI clearly did not respect borders either. The advisor retorted and once again, they collapsed into a shouting match. The channel flicked over and a shot of people panic buying in supermarkets added to the noise. In the background behind the reporter was a family fighting physically over the last multipack of toilet paper.
Brodie grabbed the remote for the old TV and turned it off before going back to his book. Eleanor was next to him with her laptop and pad, as well as a massive pile of her own books that they had fetched from her house that morning after their time on Calton Hill. Brodie meanwhile had his large oak desk covered with everything he could collect from both his family, and the other families in his community. It included paintings, home-made books and journals, poetry, notations, and in the centre of all of it was his family ‘bible’. It was a large book that gave the impression of being a potion tome from an old medieval wizards library. Its thick mushroom-leather-bound cover was beautifully decorated, and its pages were a myriad of beautiful writing, diagrams, pictures, extracts, collages, and everything else you could imagine, examining in microscopic detail the original prophecy, and its related phenomenon. Eleanor, despite never having been inclined to romantic notions, was in awe of it. She had never been privy to it before, despite their childhood times spent together, and she couldn’t believe how beautiful it was.
Liam was proud of his handiwork. He had constructed it himself in the broken entrance of a shop on the Royal Mile that was abandoned and had been looted the night before. The shop windows were smashed and its door hinges broken. Using remnants of the old sign from above the door, he finished spraying it and stepped back. ‘Fadeaway - pre party tickets here’. He had been busy, and the graffiti-styled shop banner was the final step in his master plan to become the ultimate party guru. He had not aspired to much in the way of entrepreneurship in the past, but this situation seemed to have given him new purpose. In the face of all this fear, he saw opportunity, and a chance to embrace hedonism to its fullest. The last two days had been full of phone calls with prominent and rising DJ’s, equipment specialists, anarchist groups, alcohol merchants, drug dealers, costume shops, social media influencers, and more. He had spun an online web with a beautiful landing page that would funnel people in. And now, as he hung up his sign, he stood in front of his friend’s camera, ready to record his first video inviting people to his once in a lifetime ‘end of the world’ party. He imagined thousands of anxious thumbs on glass screens, and knew in his heart that they were not ready for what he was going to bring them. His friend called, ‘Action!’
As Liam’s broadcast went out across the prominent social media channels in a geographically targeted campaign that reached out west to Glasgow, south as far as Newcastle, and north up to Inverness, millions of people sat with their phones in shaky hands, flicking through the algorithms for answers. Alongside Liam’s video, which quickly went viral for its audacity, another entrepreneur was also making large amounts of money online. A man who went by the name of James Shambala from London, who had until now been a semi-successful yoga teacher and spiritual healer. James was now selling ‘Evergreen’ crystals. ‘Designed to heal your aura and extract the negative residue of past actions, so that you can fully denounce your historical misdeeds and be granted clemency in the eyes of the prophet’. His dropship account had already crashed twice under the strain of people’s orders, and for the first time in his life, James was wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. His fingers smelled sharp with the lingering scent of dodgy crystals, and fresh bank notes.
Brodie’s grandmother brought over two mugs of herbal tea for her grandson and Eleanor as they worked. Eleanor smiled at her in a conciliatory way when she gratefully received the warm drink. The smell of it permeated the room, thick with chamomile, mint, and a few other herbs that were designed to help with focus. She still wasn’t sure what she made of her grandson making up with this girl so easily, but she admired his ability to forgive and decided for now to follow his lead, and so smiled back at her.
They sure were working hard as well, both of them poured over her books and diagrams, while Eleanor took notes on her pad. There seemed to be some quite surprising synchronicity in their discoveries so far, despite the striking differences in the mediums. She watched as Brodie traced his finger over a diagram showing the cycles of the seasons as they pertained to the circle of life and death in plants and the soil. Eleanor followed his narration keenly, and was amazed to discover a similar trend in cadence of the prophet’s words. As she extracted data from the diagrams and notations in the books, she started plugging it into her models and creating graphs and data streams, only to find that the prophet’s words had a mathematical similarity to some of the natural rhythms being described in our family’s texts. Her appreciation for our archaic methods of study was becoming increasingly obvious as she too started to open books and share in the collective insights we had recorded over time.
Liam sat in the abandoned shop feeling more alive than he had felt in a while. His party had sold out in less than an hour and now he was sitting on the countertop of the shop he had taken over, its wooden, varnished surface and former elegance contrasting with his fashion sense and bold colours. He had purposefully chosen an outfit with lots of gold and red in it, and was wearing gold jewellery to make a mockery of the leaves outside. He sat with a group of close friends, and enjoyed a large meal served in plastic cartons. Food from one of his suppliers for the party. It was delicious, greasy, rich junk food. He hadn’t asked too many questions about the food’s origins. He had already seen some of the reports of people clashing in markets, and was not completely convinced that this food was not stolen. He decided he didn’t care. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Music pulsed through the room and was interspersed with small snippets of news as one of his friends loudly flicked through videos of chaos on his phone, images of traffic jams as people tried to travel to their second homes, images of protestors chanting outside official buildings. Sometimes his friend would share stories with the group and laugh about them. ‘It’s a pure circus, man. Folk are goin’ pure radge.’. He was heard to say more than once. Liam took another bite of his wrap and took a swig of the tequila, the bittersweet taste washing away the grease and the background guilt, laughing along with the rest.
Eleanor looked for a while at her charts noting some strange correlations between two datasets. All that day she had spent researching with Brodie, trying to figure out what would come next in the architect’s plan. The phrase deciduous and evergreen played through her mind over and over, certain as she was that it was the key to understanding the architect’s plans. She had not grown comfortable enough yet with their beliefs to call it the prophet. But the fact that coniferous trees had survived was no accident. At first she had hoped that one action was it, that the worst was over and that they would just have to deal with the fallout from one event, but after meeting Brodie and hearing more about his families beliefs, it was clear this was just a warning shot across the bow before the full broadside would come crashing into the side of societies sickly boat.
Pouring through hers and Brodie’s books had started to yield a hypothesis of sorts, though it made her feel terrified to consider its ramifications. Brodie’s family had long held that the final message of the prophet would be a judgement on humanity. That people would literally be judged, one by one, and those deemed too unbalanced would be put to sleep for the winter as a punishment for their unnatural ways, and as a way to mitigate their influence so that the evergreen people could work effectively to bring about change while the others dreamt. It had until recently seemed like the most ludicrous notion, tantamount to revolutionary and dangerous political thinking, but the leaf drop event had shaken her belief in the realms of normality, and she was open to it potentially being true. She had spent the day then, looking at all the studies Brodie’s community had made on the prophet’s original message. She had been impressed by their depth. Not only had they looked at the words, but they had found meaning in the structure of his sentences, the timing of his words, the syllables, even the way certain words could be translated in other languages gained new significance under this microscopic dissection they had undertaken in the last 59 years. In every facet they studied, they found natural correlation, as if the entire message had been written perfectly in sync with earth’s natural systems. Now as she looked at her charts, something was becoming clearer. She coughed to clear her throat.
“Brodie?”
He looked up from the desk where he had been resting his head for a moment, his eyes bleary from having nearly fallen asleep. She walked over to his desk and flicked on the little lamp as she passed, to add some light to the room against the wishes of the setting sun. Placing her pad down in front of him she pulled up a data set shown as a graph.
“Look, here is the equation we extracted from your books overlaid with a summarisation of people’s carbon data, lifestyle impact, energy usage, and more. Based on individuals’ footprints as of the last carbon census. It’s nearly perfect. Clearly whatever is coming is going to be using people’s environmental impact, but look here, the correlation drops off as you get closer to the bottom half of the impact curve”. She flicked her finger across the pad and brought up a new chart. This time the data from Brodie’s books was overlaid against data that showed people’s capital footprint, their assets and wealth. The correlation this time in the top half was very aligned again, but with a few anomalies.
“So what,” Brodie asked, it will target people who have a big impact, and who are rich?” He smiled for a second, his left-wing side showing itself. “No surprises there,” he said, laughing mockingly.
“Not quite,” Eleanor flicked the data set once more and showed a third data set.
“This is the architect’s data overlaid with the last thirty years of public voting intention related to green policies and lifestyle policies. This is super interesting, because before the resolution of 2054 when government policy-making became public, and regular polling was introduced, this would not have been clear. But now we have access to a public ledger of the population’s sentiment to different policies over time, and this is where it gets really cool. The correlation is clearly showing intention. Let me show you an example. Here is the CEO of Defcon Energy. His wealth, lifestyle and voting intentions are clear. He is absolutely Deciduous. But here is the CEO of Tandem, the non-profit web browser company. Still one of the richest people in the world, but lives a famously sustainable lifestyle, AND votes regularly in favour of sustainable policy and humanitarian aid. He is, according to my model, an evergreen. I think… and I know it sounds crazy, I can’t believe I am even considering this… But I think the architect knows what people think. I think intention is a factor in this, and that it is not just a simple mathematical formula based on how eco-friendly people are. I think he.. The architect knows what people actually believe too.”
Brodie looked at all of it and blinked. This makes so much sense now. Grabbing a few books from his own pile, he went back to pages he had bookmarked earlier.
“Our traditions say the land knows your heart,” he muttered quietly. “It knows your intentions.But how is that possible? Like, if it’s an AI or a nano virus, or…” He stopped and looked at Eleanor for clarification. She looked both alive, and defeated at the same time.
“I don’t think this is something any known technology could do,” she admitted. Eleanor looked at the massive tome again, and turned to the page that had made her gasp in wonder just hours before. The original pages from Jean’s famous Diary, carefully placed in the centralmost pages of the book. Brodie’s great grandmother’s words, Mrs. Wilson’s mum. She found the passage she was looking for and read aloud.
- It will listen to your stories, to the beat of your heart, to the choices you’ve made. And it will decide if you are a tree that needs to stand tall and guard the winter... or a tree that needs to let go, to rest, to dream of spring. -
“It is real, and it knows us.” She said in a lonely whisper. Brodie grabbed her hand and held it tight, both for his own, and her comfort and reassurance.
Liam walked out of his mum’s house with two shoulder bags, one over each shoulder. His friends waited around the corner, knowing full well how much they would be shouted at if his mum caught sight of them. She had made it clear many times that she did not approve of these new friends. ‘Wayward people with no ambition or decency’ were the choice words she had pulled from the ether. Little did she know, he didn’t intend to come back. If this party was as successful as indications showed, he would be minted, and would be able to move out. He had packed already, assured of this outcome. As if the world was showing him a sign, one of his own flyers blew past, reminding him of how great his plan was. Nothing could go wrong now.
Liam’s mum in the meantime was in her office. She at least knew Eleanor was safe at Brodie’s house, that was something. But the phone networks had been acting strangely, and she hadn’t heard from her in a few hours. Liam, however, well, she had seen him briefly in his room, that was the best she could hope for. Ever since her husband had died, Liam had become such a hard child to manage.
In the meantime she distracted herself with a new project. She had joined in on a new online trend. Multiple companies who had already made a living selling carbon credits and offsetting people’s carbon, suddenly popped up and seized the opportunity to turn a profit. She too was now online buying carbon credits in the hope that it would be enough. The sun set outside as she traded another £400 for a credit in a carbon offset scheme.
The next morning, Eleanor woke up in the armchair in Brodie’s living room. Brodie was still asleep, his head resting on a pile of books at his desk, a blanket falling down the back of his chair. She got up and pulled the blanket up over his shoulders again. Over the last day she had been shocked at how simply and easily he had forgiven her, and how beautifully the years that had passed seemed to matter for nothing. They had laughed, cried, and researched. For the first time in a while she felt part of a team again, and was excited by what she was discovering. This time she wasn’t studying to be the best, she was studying because it mattered. Because maybe what they would learn might help. She looked over the book that was open before him, and admired the intricate drawings of nature as they illustrated the diagrams. Beautiful ink drawings of animals, birds and plants complimented the writing. The images seemed almost animated in the light of the morning sun, bright today for a change, with a rich orange hue.
Suddenly her pad, still on the desk crackled and came alive with that now familiar blue glow.
“Oh no, Brodie! Brodie!?” She shook him awake and pointed. A pattern emerged on the pad, and the radio in the kitchen in the next room started to make a rumbling sound, like a waterfall crashing on rocks.
From the darkness of the patterns now seething in Eleanor’s tablet, a single, unblinking eye fades into view. It is vast, ancient, and luminous, seemingly woven from living moss and pulsating starlight and molten rock. It stared directly out of the pad, scanning and looking around, it settled in their combined direction, looking not at them, but through them.
A soft melody, as if sung by a child, seemed to lean out of every wall, its delicacy is like the sand on a beach being washed to and fro by gentle waves.
Look. A pretty one.
Doctor Solveig Lund.
She sings such a sad, sweet song... for the last little creatures in their melting little worlds.
The pupil of the eye seemed to slowly dilate.
And all the while... She flies...
on the warm, dark, putrid breath... of sleeping giants... to sing her bird like song.
She drinks and bathes in a birdbath filled with the tears of a mountain... from a little cup that never, ever rots.
The architect’s voice holds a note of genuine, child-like curiosity, as if observing a beautiful, flawed insect.
Her heart is so... FULL. Full of pretty, pretty... meanings.
But the song she sings... and the flap of her birdlike wings...The nest, full of artefacts and shiny things.
...My words rhyme, how amusing! But hers do not.
The architect breathed a soft, sighing sound, like the rustle of leaves.
Hush now, little doctor.
Such a heavy heart, so very heavy, it must be so very tired.
It’s time... to rest your wings, little dove.
As the final word echoed, the moss-and-starlight lidded eye gave one, slow, impossibly ancient wink. Then it vanished. The screen snapped back to a live, panicked news broadcast, the anchors just realizing they were all simultaneously hijacked.
Brodie looked up at Eleanor’s horrified expression and put an arm around her. Dr. Lund had been a hero to both of them growing up. A woman who had dedicated her life to environmental causes, and campaigned tirelessly on behalf of the planet. Or so they had thought. The sudden shock of seeing her being called out as one of the first Deciduous, it was a lot to take in.
“So, what you said last night is true then, it knows. It can see your heart, even when others can’t? I never would have suspected Dr. Lund would have been…”
Eleanor sat next to him on the same chair and rested her head on his shoulder. There was nothing left to say. Her entire worldview had just well and truly been shattered. Science, logic, it was all being thrown out of the bathtub, and it seemed as though no one was safe. Brodie held that silence with her, like a small prayer. Eventually she spoke.
“I think my real work has only just started.” She pushed aside her data charts and looked at Brodie’s ancient, hand-drawn maps. “Show me,” she said, her voice quiet but firm. “Show me everything.”
In an airport in Sweden, the boarding screens that had just been filled with a dreadful eye proclaiming Dr. Lund to be the first deciduous, cut out and returned to normal. A second later the flight schema showed that the flight Dr. Lund had been waiting for had now been cancelled. Solveig stood there, rooted to the spot like a butterfly pinned to a museum display, after every screen in the entire building had stared right at her. Her hand gripped a plastic water bottle tightly, causing it to crunch loudly in the quiet terminal. As she considered the ramifications of what had just happened, she felt exposed, naked. The people around her, once admiring faces, slowly started to back off, their expressions turning inwardly to disgust and fear. Her entire life suddenly became ashes in her mouth.
A child in a nearby seat who had been waiting to board the same plane to New York shouted in a thick American accent and pointed at her.
“Mummy, is that the lady who the man said is a naughty bird?”
And so, the lines blur between science and faith, reason and instinct. Eleanor, humbled and terrified, begins a new kind of research, finding unexpected truths hidden within Brodie’s ancient family lore . Liam embraces the chaos, choosing hedonism as his shield . Around the world, society begins to fracture under the weight of fear and opportunism .
The Architect’s first judgment, calling out the respected Dr. Lund, proves Eleanor’s chilling hypothesis: this isn’t just about environmental impact; it knows our hearts, our intentions . The “sorting” has begun, and the question is no longer if it’s real, but how it decides… And who is next.
Now, I turn to you. The Architect seems to judge based on inner intention, not just outward action. If it could see your heart today, would it judge you Deciduous or Evergreen? Why?
I’m fascinated to read your reflections in the comments.
This story is getting better and better with each read. I'm so intrigued by the Architect, and I am deeply invested in the characters. I cannot wait to see how they go about tackling this terrifying dilemma. I'm curious if Liam is going to ever join up with Kael and Elara moving forward. I would hope the Architect judged me as Evergreen, but it is seriously making me side-eye my own green thumb and if it is green enough.
Excellent continuation. The narrative transition from the last dispatch is seamless, immediately establishing a potent new paradigme for these consequences.