The Forest Mind

When I wake, I wake in a bed of fog. Cold fog, like my skin were made of steel, with ice frozen over the surface. Waiting to crack, to shatter away. The haze seeps into my skull, feeding the storm clouds which rage within. It’s lighting courses through my veins, leaving the metallic taste of adrenalin on my tongue. Do I dare open my eyes?

“My love?”

The familiar voice fills me, breath in my lungs, warmth in my chest. Is this my name? ‘Love?’ It shall be my name.

“Are you awake my Love?”

Again! Who calls me? The voice consumes me, like endearing arms around my waist. Or the warmth of a fireplace on a cold night while the rain drums on the rusty roof. Fire. I remember this, from somewhere sometime, many years ago. Ice, too, and chocolate and heartbreak and that quiet little cafe below my apartment with a barista who once wrote his number on my takeaway cup. I never called.

Someone calls me now. Her voice smells of petrichor, or perhaps, a hot chocolate. These are the scents I once loved, that I can only recall the names of. I remember only that they were nice. I must see who calls me. I open my eyes.

The light of some overrated deity drowns my vision. I squint through it, shielding my eyes with a hand that can’t possibly belong to me. Oh piss off. I think. Or at least turn your brightness down. When my eyes adjust, The Creator does not stand before me, but the furious sun. Great and overzealous and disputably righteous in its place in the sky. (Disputably, because I don’t appreciate being blinded.) I suppose it was a little like a diety after all. I must have believed in one of them at some point, maybe as a child. But I know now that they played no part in crafting the face before me - no deity could be capable of such art. That’s the thing about gods: They have no eye for detail. The Creator may make the sand, but it’s the ants who build the kingdom. And it’s the ants, inevitably, who tear it down for the pot of gold beneath.

This face consists of more than sand, except where it washes through the colour of her hair, almost glass beneath the heat. Her face, stone, stubborn and enduring, yet age wore away at her. Her cheeks mutter stories of a thousand terrors through the cracks and erosions of her skin. She wears her scars proudly. Her eyes - softer. A garden of fertile soil, which birthed a thirsty forest. Here, hope blooms in the flower of her eye, and trickles through the cracks of her stone cheek. I know this face. I knew this face.

She peers down at me. I had seen this look before. The worry seared into her frown, the sadness. Once, a long time ago, or perhaps not long at all, this was her face as I died. My hand pressed against her heart, as though her pulse would give me life. Let this desert hill become my grave, let me become sand, as all life someday will. Her scarred hand soft against my cheek, “I’m not letting you go, dear.” She fiddled with the programmer in one hand, the little heart shaped locket in the other. “Stay awake, my love. Stay-“

“Am I Love?” This is my first question.

Her frown twists into a grin, “you’re alive!”

“No, not alive. Love!”

The frown again, this time thoughtful. Then: “yes, dear. You are called Love.” A horse whinnied nearby, drawing her eyes from mine. With one hand she digs into the saddlebag, retrieving an apple. The horse gleefully accepts. With one hand, I realise, because she cradles my form in the palm of her other.

“Where am I?” The red ocean stretches out, it’s surface churns in the wind. Rock statues glare down, leering, challenging. The once green hills engulfed in flame.

“The Forest isn’t too far from here, just over those dunes on the far side of the desert.”

I know this, somehow. The Forest database was my destination. I suppose what I should have asked was what am I?

Prompted by my silence, she sighs. “Back on that hill, while you were-“ her words lodge in her throat. “I used those computer parts you stole to program a sort of Forest in my locket.”

“Are you crazy? Powerful databases aren’t supposed to be squeezed into lockets.”

“I had to save you somehow!” She swings her leg over the back of the horse.

“You saved me alright! Like a damn computer file.”

She fastens the locket, my prison, around her neck. “I need to upload you to the Forest before the locket fails. We don’t have much time.”

Time. What a ridiculous notion. My severed consciousness dangles over the valley of limbo by the thin silver chain of a locket. My existence is hollow, inhuman, merely a string of ones and zeros which imitates a fading memory. The wrath of time should bear no power over my formless being. And yet, it drags me, limp, through the desert wasteland of its victims. This was a city, once. The ants have starved their kingdom, and when they fled, the ticking storm ate away at their scraps. How gluttonous time should be, that it should feast upon the universe until all that abided by it becomes sand within it’s stomach. This is its revenge I’m sure, humanity provoked it when they invented a database to immortalise human consciousness. But she has slipped between its gnashing teeth, and her chest is warm against me.

The sun hangs low, dying under the weight of night. This is one of time’s few gifts: Sunsets. It ignites the sky. A parade of flaming dancers waltz, their dresses crafted in the rage of a dragon’s breath. It flares out, a last hoorah before it’s death. Like drunken soldiers singing late into the night before they rest in their battlefield graves in the morning.

“Do you remember this?” I could feel her hand against me.

“This is where I kissed you.” This memory doesn’t belong to me. “Well not here exactly, but the same sun. It’s older now.”

She’s smiling. I can feel it. Night ensues.

“We’ll camp here.” Her voice is low, her footfalls light and calculated, careful not to provoke some beast hidden among the dunes. She leads the horse back behind a crumbling sandstone wall, which emerged from the side of a sand mound. Shelter in a desert is scarce. The night settles like a ragged street cat on a discarded towel, hungry, with dreams of scattering white mice, teeming lanterns in the sky. She rolls out her sleeping bag and, like the homeless cat, curls up inside.

“I’ll be here,” I say, burdened with the curse of eternal consciousness, “watching out for you.”

That’s all my limbless form is capable of. Watching. Watching her, watching the life of someone I once was. I’ve dug through every memory and every thought. I still can’t find our names. Hers is a warrior name, something crafted in fire. My name is Love. That is all I am, her love, in a locket around her neck. I begin to wonder where the uploaded consciousness goes. Does it get bored? Does it feel pain? Does it live in a kingdom of uploaded minds? Some say it is reborn, in another time perhaps.

A shift in the night air stirs me. Something is near.

“Wake up!” My cries are muffled by the fabric. The click of the saddle bag lock is almost drowned out by the whirring and beeping of a device. It grows louder as it approaches, accompanied by the scraping of heavy boots on rock. It’s source is inches from me. “Please wake up!” A rough hand digs into the sheet, taking me in it’s grasp and tugging. I feel her heartbeat wake. She launches from the sand, landing her foot square in it’s chest. The chain breaks free and I feel the stone wall against my back, as though I had struck it with the weight of a human. It stumbles back, dumbfounded, then charges. She dodges, drawing a blade from its sheath on the horse, and before it can turn to charge again, drives it into it’s back.

“Never seen you do that before.”

She answers with silence, fumbling with her torch as she creeps toward the thieving creature. It’s a boy, barely grown. His blood sinks into the sand. His hand limp over his metal detector.

“Shit!”

“Is he-?

“He’s dead.”

I watch her reach for her chest, for me, then flash her torch toward the wall. Finding me half buried in sand, she kneels, taking me in her hands to examine the damage. She never seems to lose that frown.

“You have a crack.”

“You have more it seems...emotionally.”

“Don’t be a bitch. We need to go.”

With some thread to repair the chain, I retake my throne at the right hand of her heart. The hazy sun fades into the morning, sort of unfocused and blurred. Dark clouds creep into my vision as the software begins to fail. The dunes wash together, like an ocean churning and lashing out under God’s furious tantrum. The horse’s tracks are buried behind us, as though we were lost spirits, eternally roaming a mortal prison. The apex of the hill looks down upon a valley of tents and shacks, the survivor’s makeshift city. The ants rebuild from the rubble, they live harmoniously with the sand.

“We’re nearly there.”

The people take no notice of the broken traveller passing through, they themselves are nothing more than refugees, God’s discarded cats. I am fading.

At the gate of a dilapidated research centre with boarded windows and weeds which broke through the cracks, she flashes her ID to the guard, who tugs aside the gate with a nod. “Doctor.”

She moves quickly, stealthily, up a round of stairs. I feel her heart rate pounding. She rushes by a group of labcoats who grow pale at the sight of her. I am fading. I am dying.

“Doctor? You can’t be here!”

She breaks into a sprint down the white hallway, toward a steel door labelled Consciousness Upload Database AKA FOREST.

“Stop her!”

The sound of heavy footsteps pursue. She swipes her card, slips through the door and dismantles the keypad from the other side. Thick rows of whirring screens and switches stretch out into the darkness, each muttering the secrets of it’s files in a hush chatter of ones and zeros.

“I can’t let you die. I can’t let you-.”

“I know.”

She turns over the locket and pulls a chip from the back, inserting it into a me-sized-hole. The computers flare up, screaming, shrieking. I can hear them. I can feel them. Their energy ignites me, my consciousness burns. It hurts! Oh it hurts! I am electricity. I am power... I am Love. I bring myself to form, not quite opaque, and take her hand in mine. “I will always be here.” With a flickering hand I press the locket against her heart and plant a kiss upon her teary cheek. “As long as time exists, I am here.” She smiles.

When I wake, I wake in a bed of fog. Cradled, soft in a mothers arms. Her voice is honey, thick and warm. “I will name you Amara.”