Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  Goddamn fucking humans. The worst.

  WHEN SHE JOINED THE Assemblage she had felt like they understood. They got it. They could see The Machine for what it was—a vast system established solely to allow the human virus to replicate and consume at any cost. And The Assemblage had formed to restore balance.

  She’d only met one other member of The Assemblage, as a precursor to her redwoods mission. Their group thrived in the anonymity of a subnet supposedly facilitated by a sixteen-year-old kid who’d been vying for membership in a hacker group with a classy name—World Wide Stab. So instead of having a batch of finks and fuck-ups gather in somebody’s musty patchouli-patch living room with an inevitable COINTELPRO-variant mole, The Assemblage existed only as a loosely organized forum of people who understood The Machine and challenged each other to disassemble it in as many ways as possible.

  Minks were liberated from a farm in northern Oregon, their pricey cages devastated after the exodus. Two Humvee dealerships in Washington got hit, one with well-placed Molotovs, the other with thousands of highly adhesive bumper stickers reading “NAMBLA Member and Proud of It!” Chimps were saved from HIV testing at a biotech development firm outside of San Diego, and subnet photos showed them being returned home to a preserve in Africa (where, Amelia guessed, their lack of survival skills probably got them torched as “bush meat” shortly thereafter). Every Wal-Mart in New Jersey arrived to glue-filled locks on the exact same morning.

  Not everything The Assemblage pulled was to Amelia’s liking, but overall they seemed to be one of the only groups out there worth a damn.

  That was until the Oregon tree spiking incident shook them up.

  She’d been shocked too, initially, when she opened the forum thread. The title read, “97% of Oregon Old Growth Gone—Don’t Fuck With Our Last 3%.” Two quick clicks on the title and she was staring at a grainy, zoomed-in digital photo: a logger’s face turned meatloaf, head nearly bisected, left eye loose of its orbit. Text beneath that: No more warning signs for spikes! Let’s really put Earth first! Feed the worms another tree killer!

  The Assemblage, for all its rhetoric and snarky misanthropy, was not prepared for murder. Buddhist members cried bad karma. Pacifists quoted Gandhi. Anarchist kids sweated clean through their black bandanas, wondering if eco-terrorist association charges would make Mom and Dad kill the college funds. Membership dwindled in anticipation of Fed heat.

  Amelia, however, was applauding. The Oregon spikers got it right. Now The Machine was short a cog, and she knew any loggers working that territory had a new thought in their heads: Is this worth dying for?

  She was inspired. She knew that acres of redwoods south of her home in Eureka were about to be offered up as a smorgasbord to a conglomerate of corporate interests, one of the final parting gifts from King George’s administration.

  She had hiked those territories since her childhood, and even now she trekked there with her son Henry. The trees there were giants, vast even among redwoods, some topping thirty-five stories tall, with trunks over twenty feet around. To her they were great and ancient things, representatives from better times.

  To grow for thousands of years only to be destroyed for the “cubic feet” needed to house more goddamned MOB’s (Morbidly Obese Breeders, Assemblage code for the common-folk) . . . Amelia couldn’t stomach the idea.

  She planned. There were only a few months until the virgin forest was to be royally fucked by bulldozers and cat-tracks and chain-saws and cranes.

  Despite being consumed with finding a way to stop The Machine from gaining penetration, she tried to stay balanced.

  Nights were for plotting—surveying and copping gear and staying tuned to those few voices on The Assemblage that still raged and let her know she wasn’t alone.

  Days were for Henry—homeschooling and hiking and lessons in doing no harm. Late summer heat let them swim in a pond near their property, sometimes until dusk brought out flurries of gnats and insect-chasing bats. These were the sorts of things she pointed out to Henry, to remind him that he needn’t be jealous of the TV shows his friends talked about.

  Not that she let Henry see those friends too often. Their life was very contained, and she couldn’t risk outside influence turning her son into another one of . . . them.

  She never intended to become a Breeder and had a hard time accepting the extra pressure she was creating for the taxed environment. But she reminded herself that she had not had Henry for selfish reasons. She’d been young and confused, and had made the mistake of being seduced by a gangly hippie boy named Grant, who was drifting through town with a few hundred other friends on their way to a Rainbow Family gathering.

  She was pulled away from the boredom of her grocery store stock clerk gig in Eureka, and spent over a year wandering the US with the Family, dropping acid and shitting in woodland troughs, shoplifting steaks and air duster (for cooking and huffing, respectively). Free love gave her a nice case of genital warts and a disappearing period.

  Grant, lover that he was, offered to sell off his Phish bootlegs to pay for an abortion, but by the time she’d really put the pieces together she was already in the second trimester, and the kicks in her belly had her feeling like this kid was closer to alive than not. She killed the LSD and nitrous habits and smoked a lot of weed and ate buckets of trail mix and waited for the Rainbow Family train to circumnavigate back toward Eureka.

  The train didn’t quite chug fast enough and she ended up having Henry on the outskirts of a field in eastern Oregon, near the Blue Mountains. A girl named Hester, who claimed to be a midwife, shouted at Amelia to breathe. Then, once she confirmed Amelia was indeed breathing, she shared what she must have thought was comforting wisdom.

  “The Armillaria mushroom that grows near here is the biggest living thing on Earth. It’s underground. It’s like three miles wide.”

  Then she wandered off into the distance, perhaps to find this giant mushroom, leaving Amelia alone to have the most primal experience of her life.

  She felt abandoned for a moment, cursing Grant for his carelessness, herself for being seduced by the irresponsibility dressed as freedom that brought her to this Third-World state. But loneliness was swiftly crushed by a series of contractions and a sense of animal purpose. Then everything was waves of pain, and a sudden release, and the sound of tiny lungs taking first air. Amelia collapsed with her boy, loneliness long forgotten.

  She was cradling Henry in her arms when a dirt-bag named Armando wandered by and offered to help. He also, she later realized, wouldn’t stop looking at her crotch. Still, he had a Leatherman, and in cutting her umbilical, was the closest thing Henry had to an obstetrician.

  With her infant son in her arms she’d found it easy to beg enough change to get a Greyhound Bus ride back to glorious Eureka.

  Since then she’d done her best to raise Henry outside of an ever-sickening American culture. If she had to be a Breeder, she’d make damn sure that her contribution to the next generation gave back to the Earth in some way. Since she couldn’t trust Henry to the goddamned Rockefeller Worker Training Camp they called Public School she’d had to reconnect with her parents and beg enough of a stipend to support her and the kid.

  It meant her parents got to visit Henry on occasion, but she was sure to let him know that these were Bad People. Industrialists. Plastic makers. Part of the Problem. They were piggies.

  Still, they kept her and Henry in the food and clothes business, and Amelia took a secret joy in spending their money on the various laptops and servers that maintained her connection to the subnet and The Assemblage.

  And lately she’d been spending their cash on climbing gear. It had taken her a precious couple of weeks to come up with her plan, but if she pulled it off she’d be able to protect the forest and keep it from being tied to her or her new associate.

  She’d drafted “Cristoff” from another subnet board called Green Defense, where he’d developed a reputation for being too extreme. His avatar was a pictur
e of Charles Whitman with the word HERO embossed at the bottom.

  They vetted each other via subnet friends. “Cristoff” agreed to drive up from San Francisco so they could get to work. Real names, they agreed, would never be exchanged.

  Posing as husband and wife—Mr. and Mrs. Heartwood, har har har—they hooked up with a local arborist named Denny who gave lessons in recreational tree climbing down by the Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

  Henry was allowed to spend a week with his friend Toby (whose family she found the least disgusting).

  She and Cristoff were quick learners. They picked up “crack-jamming” on day one, which allowed them to free climb a redwood’s thick, gnarled bark by pinning hands and feet into the crevices. Day two taught them how to use mechanical Jumar ascenders, rope, and a tree-climbing saddle to get much higher. This was called “jugging,” a term which Cristoff found amusing.

  “I’ll tell my buddies I spent all week crack-jamming and jugging with a new lady friend.”

  Who was this guy? And he had friends? That was concerning.

  Still, he could climb, and was willing to help her with the delicate work they needed to do up in the unprotected redwoods.

  At night she wore a head-lamp in her tent and read up on great trees: Forest canopies held half of the living species in nature. The top of the tree was the crown, which could be its own ecosystem, several feet across, filled with canopy soil up to a meter deep, hosting hundreds of ferns, barbed salmonberry canes, even fruit-bearing huckleberry bushes. These crowns were miracles of fractal reiteration, with some sprouting hundreds of exacting smaller versions of the main tree, all of them reaching for the sun. The redwoods were one of the last homes for legions of unnamed prehistoric lichen and some canopies even inexplicably harbored worms and soil-mites previously thought to be extinct.

  She was particularly happy to read that both HIV and Ebola were postulated to have come from human interaction with canopy-dwelling primates and bats. These trees were already fighting back. It gave her mission a sense of camaraderie. She would work with these noble giants as an advance warning system. Don’t fuck with our last 3%.

  Amelia and Cristoff spent the last part of their lessons learning a technique for which they’d paid extra. Skywalking was a way of manipulating multiple ropes and knots in the upper canopy, allowing you to float from branch to branch without applying too much weight. Properly done you could even move from crown to crown.

  They had to be able to do this, as the crowns they’d be leaving would be far too treacherous to allow return. They were going to create a logger’s nightmare up there.

  That was the plan—To spend a week camped among the canopies, working to saw dozens of branches just short of the snapping point. The loggers and climbers call these hanging branches “widow-makers” and with good reason. Falling from stories above they could reach terminal velocity and they typically tore loose an armada of forest shrapnel on their way down. One turn-of-the-century account of a widow-maker dispatch simply read, “Wilson was ruined. Pieces were found five feet high in surrounding trees. The rest of him was already buried beneath the branch. Most could not be retrieved for proper interment.”

  How many loggers would be splattered by her old growth nukes before they asked the crucial question?

  Is this worth dying for?

  THAT WAS THE PLAN, at least until Cristoff decided to get in a fight with gravity.

  There are different types of branches on a redwood. The higher branches can be thick as most regular trees and are rooted deeply into the trunk. The lower branches are far narrower. Between hand-fuls of strawberry granola Denny had told them these lesser branches were called epicormics, or “dog’s hair” for slang. They were easily shed and not to be trusted.

  Cristoff was getting comfortable in the trees, pleased with his progress. Denny told them not to be surprised if this felt strangely natural, since all other primates were at least partially arboreal.

  Cristoff’s inner monkey had him gassed up and proud after a few strong ascents. Cristoff’s inner monkey started feeling an imaginary kinship with the tree. The kind of false trust that let him think a batch of epicormics would hold as well as a single trunk-rooted branch.

  He was sixty feet up, ten feet past the climber’s “redline” cutoff for survivable falls. He ignored Denny’s request that he rope a higher branch. The last thing he said through the walkie talkie was, “I’ve got this.”

  The redwood, clearly disagreeing, decided to shed some weight.

  The sounds were as follows: a sharp crack as the branches separated, a shocked yell accompanied by a terrible whooshing sound as gravity got serious, and at last a chimerical whoomp-crunch as Cristoff created the first and only Cristoff Crater at Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

  Technically, per Denny’s lessons, he was supposed to yell “Headache” if any object was falling, even himself. His neglect would be forgiven the moment Denny and Amelia approached his body.

  Cristoff was breathing, but the crimson gurgles at each exhale screamed hemorrhage, and compound fractures at the femur and clavicle had happened so fast that the bone still jutted white and proud with little blood to emphasize how shattered the man was.

  Still in shock, Denny informed Cristoff that he shouldn’t move.

  As far as Amelia could see, this was a non-issue. Whoever this Cristoff was, she had a hard time imagining he’d ever move again.

  Denny held out hope, lucking into a cell phone signal and getting Air Life dispatched.

  Amelia tried to get Cristoff’s eyes to focus on hers, but his were glazed and the left had gone bright red. She could hear a helicopter in the distance.

  She prayed for telepathy. She stared at the broken man and thought, “Don’t you say a motherfucking word.”

  With that, she turned and walked to her rental Chrysler. Denny’s eyes stayed fixed on the injured man as “Mrs. Heartwood” gunned the car out of the park, leaving an odd impression, some cheap camping gear, and the crushed shell of a man she hoped would die, and fast.

  WEAK MEN WERE SHAPING Amelia’s world. First Grant left her with an STD and a kid. Then the spiked logger’s greed and split skull became the catalyst that weakened the resolve of The Assemblage. Now the man she knew as “Cristoff” turned snitch.

  It wasn’t intentional, but the bastard (real name: Richard Eggleston) had managed to make it to the hospital, and the opiate mix they pumped into him for pain management left him delirious. His night nurse picked up enough chatter about “tree bombs” to feel comfortable playing Dutiful Citizen and calling the Feds.

  The Feds got to his computer gear. The subnet that hosted The Assemblage was fluid enough that they were able to block Fed access and re-route themselves, but speculation about what might have been on Eggleston’s hard drive had a variety of already-freaked underground groups on full black helicopter alarm.

  Worse still, The Assemblage had gone even more limp-dicked. Even staunch hard-liners she’d once trusted were calling the glimmers of her plan that had gone public “monstrous and irresponsible.”

  She put her stress in the wrong places, snapping at Henry for minor transgressions like leaving his crayons out. She was forgetting to eat.

  Then a new voice joined The Assemblage—Mycoblastus Sanguinarius. Black bloody heart. She looked it up and discovered the namesake was a tiny lichen that revealed a single dot of blood-like fluid when ruptured.

  He signed his posts as Myco. She assumed the member was a “he” since the writing had a masculine terseness, but there was no way to be sure.

  Myco posted an open letter to anyone who might have been involved in the aborted “redwoods plan.” He begged them to contact him privately, saying that he might have a way to help them reach their goal without shedding any blood.

  He had to be a mole, right?

  She ignored Myco and tried to come up with her own new plan. Random spiking? Fire-bombing bulldozers?

  The stress amped her self-loathing. You say yo
u hate humans. Well, what do you think you are, bitch? What do you think Henry is? Chain yourself to a tree and starve out. Pull the media into this. How much explosive could you strap to your body? To Henry?

  These were not safe thoughts. She pushed them away. She tried to stay focused on a real option. The loggers would gain access soon.

  She sent a non-committal message to Myco. What’s your plan?

  Two days later Myco sent a response, and it felt legit. He was government, and he was upfront about it. He held a position of some influence, and if he had the right information he could get it in front of someone who might have the power to halt the government’s release of the property.

  The problem was that the property was in a weird transitory status, off limits for government-permitted climbs even for the research sector. He needed someone who knew the area to engage in a “ninja climb” and acquire a number of biological samples. Depending on what was found, the rarity of the species and its “viability for government use,” he might be able to prevent the destruction of those groves.

  But who was this guy? This was a classic COINTELPRO move. He wrote like a professor, which could place him with DARPA or one of its extensions. Could just be an FBI grunt telling her what she wanted to hear. And would it be any better if the property was retained “for government use?”

  Or was this some old hippie college teacher trying to regain his idealism after trading it for a BMW in the 80s? Maybe his son was in the California legislature? Maybe his nephew was the goddamned President?

  Who knew? But she trusted this subnet, and if he promised they’d never have to meet then she felt there was enough safety in the agreement. There’s no way he’d be able to guess which trees she’d climb. The groves were too dense, the old timber too wide.

  He assured her that all he needed were the samples, and she could leave them in a place of her choosing, as long as it was temperate and hidden. Then she just had to forward the location via GPS coordinates.