Rogue

  The flowers retreated, cowering and shaking.

  “Lemonade?” said Ajay, looking at Will and Elise helplessly.

  “You know, like an analogy or whatever. So once there were only these few of the bozos still putzing around,” said Nick, lapsing into a lame Western dialect, “I pulled out ma’ trusty lariat and went full-on bronco buster on their useless stems; head ’em up, move ’em out!”

  “Seriously, Nick, what was your plan?” asked Elise, staring at the struggling flowers.

  “Plan?” asked Nick blankly. “I was just killing time, you know, waiting for you guys. I didn’t have a plan.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” said Ajay.

  “But I have been thinking they might make a pretty sick dogsled team.”

  “There’s no snow and they move at about three miles an hour,” said Will.

  “True.” Nick nodded as he considered that for a moment. “Guess it’d depend on how big a hurry we’re in, right? And we could still run into some snow, somewhere, maybe. Where are we anyway, like up the Amazon?”

  “You’ve been up the Amazon for years,” said Ajay.

  “We’re in the Never-Was,” said Elise.

  “Oh, so the portal deal worked? That’s super cool. So what do we do now? Man, I sure am hungry. Good thing we brought some grub with us, but I figured we should rationalize it, so I didn’t chow down. And I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found anything to eat out here yet. Have you?”

  “What were you expecting, a sandwich shop?” asked Ajay.

  “Yeah, right, like that’s gonna happen, Captain Science. I was thinking more along the lines of some nuts and berries. You know, jungle food.”

  “Irony is completely wasted on him,” said Ajay to Elise, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, sure, go ahead and mock me, but if the nuts around here are as big as these petunias, I could live off a single pistachio for a week.”

  “Unless it eats you first,” said Will.

  “Interesting,” said Nick, lost in thought.

  Elise moved a few steps closer to study the captive flowers. They shied away slightly, and when she raised her hand toward them, two of the things opened their petals and let out a kind of hiss at her.

  “Back off, sunshine!” shouted Nick, yanking the rope again. “So, Will-Bear, speaking of plans, what’s the plan?”

  Before Will could answer, Elise spoke up. “They can feel.”

  “Of course they can feel,” said Ajay, wandering over near her but maintaining a greater distance from the creatures. “Galvanic surface responses to stimuli in the plant kingdom is a long-established fact—”

  “I’m not talking about autonomic responses,” said Elise. “I think these things might be sentient.”

  Nick opened up a package of peanuts from his pack. “Of course they are, babe. They’re walking, aren’t they?”

  “She said sentient, not ambulatory,” said Ajay. “As in they appear to be able to walk and think. Apparently, unlike you, at the same time.”

  “Ha-ha. Anybody want a peanut? Honey roasted,” Nick offered.

  Ajay reached into the bag and took a handful.

  “Where are you going with this, Elise?” asked Will, watching the flowers react again as he moved up beside her.

  “If they can think, maybe they have memory. Maybe even some kind of ability to communicate—”

  “Perhaps even the capacity for language,” said Ajay; then, when the others stared at him, “They’re interspecies hybrids, clearly, and there’s no telling what manner of other being they were spliced with, so I’d say every possibility remains on the table, wouldn’t you?”

  “You want to talk to them?” asked Nick, chewing and chuckling. “What are they gonna tell us? ‘Man, my roots are killin’ me today…That was one delicious bug—oh, look, a butterfly!”

  “Nick, did you bring a map with you?” asked Will. “With Dave’s or Coach Jericho’s location conveniently marked on it?”

  “No way,” scoffed Nick.

  “Then please be quiet while we find out, however strange this sounds, if your new pets can help us figure that out. And keep your whip and machete handy, okay?”

  “Can do.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ajay popped some more peanuts into his mouth as he studied the flowers. “So what would be the most effective pathway into their consciousness? Provided they do have minds, or at the least, some form of primitive brain.”

  Will and Elise looked at each other, sharing the same thought.

  You want to give it a try? he asked.

  You go first, she answered. I’m still recharging.

  “Keep an eye on ’em, Nick,” said Will. “I’m going to try something.”

  Will moved a couple of steps closer to the creatures. He blinked on the Grid and focused on the flowers. Stripped of their outward visual skins, he perceived them as vivid arrangements of biological systems, life-forces circulating through complex cellular interactions. Recalling an animation from a recent biology class, he thought they appeared to be metabolizing carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen. Just like regular plants.

  Except…

  Will narrowed his focus to just one of the creatures. Behind its petals, and that nasty hidden array of thorny mandibles, Will locked in on a small dense mass about the size of a golf ball. Solid dark green, pulsing with dynamic energy, but also cycling continually through other wavelengths of color—blue, yellow, hints of orange and magenta.

  “Nick, wave your machete at them again,” said Will.

  Nick did. The flowers drew back fearfully, just as before. And Will watched this one’s “brain” or central processor flood with varying shades of red and violet as it experienced and reacted to this physical threat.

  “Looks like they definitely have some kind of brain,” said Will.

  “I’m thinking about another intriguing, albeit as yet unproven and decidedly esoteric, theory regarding plant life,” said Ajay, looking up and to the left as he accessed the memory.

  “What’s that?” asked Elise.

  “It was a commonly held belief in the ancient world. Associated with more Neolithic cultures, naturally, but perhaps not coincidentally, one that is becoming part of modern scientific discussion, as we’ve begun to assess aboriginal shamanistic practices through a more modern lens.”

  “What belief would that be?” asked Will.

  “That all plant life shares an ability to communicate nonverbally. By means of what one might call, for lack of a better phrase, a spiritual frequency.”

  “How does that work?” asked Elise.

  “No one knows; it’s just a theory. But if it’s true, it could mean—”

  “It could mean that if you can penetrate the mind of one of these things…,” said Elise, moving ahead down the same track.

  Ajay picked up the thought from her like a runner taking a baton. “One might be able to communicate with all the examples of that particular species, as they could share a sort of—”

  “Collective mind,” said Elise.

  “Exactly!” Ajay continued. “And advancing that logic a step further, one might therefore be able to commune with all plants in general. On some grander mythical plane.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me,” said Nick.

  “I don’t recall asking you,” said Ajay.

  “I’d say it’s worth a try,” said Will.

  “What should we ask them?” asked Elise.

  “Have they seen any tall Native Americans or dead helicopter pilots running around,” said Nick. “And where can we get something to eat.”

  “Really not helpful,” said Ajay.

  “Actually, it is,” said Will. “Give me a second.”

  Will blinked on the Grid, then closed his eyes and gathered his mental energy into a cloud of intention that he then projected over toward the target flower. Trying not to overwhelm or disable the creature, he tried to first quietly surround its “mind” with the cloud, sending o
ut waves of calming vibration.

  He felt the thing relax and the color of its “brain” reverted to dark green. As Will wedged open the connection between them, emotional readings began to slowly come across to him: agitation, spikes of hatred, and a reserve of savage anger, held in check by fear.

  He paused, let the thing settle down again, then carefully probed deeper—he realized this process was more than a little similar to what he and Elise could do together and what Lyle had tried to do to him a few times. Project his mind into that of another being, but not invasively, with no intent to hurt or punish the thing, just apply a kind of gentle persuasion and gain access to its innermost thoughts—

  Then he felt some last line of resistance give way, and suddenly, somehow, he knew he was inside. The effect was jarring, jumbling, disturbing, an assault on his senses. He was inside an alien consciousness, no part of it familiar or reassuring, and he couldn’t find anything to hold on to that helped him understand its architecture or how it worked. Swirling colors and indistinct shapes swarmed all around, so he decided to let go of trying to defend against the experience and flow with it, wherever it led him.

  He suddenly felt as if he were tumbling along a swiftly moving underground stream, deep in the dark, and the many shapes appeared now as glints of light strobing on every side of him as he rushed headlong and down. Every instinct in him registered danger, urging escape and retreat. Panic rose in his gut but he wrestled it back down with a single commanding thought:

  They’re taking me somewhere I need to go.

  That helped him cut through the fear. The shapes were acquiring more form and dimension as he traveled, and he felt that speeding or falling sensation gradually begin to abate. The shapes and lights started to linger, acquire more definition, and he realized he was seeing pictures that he might soon begin to recognize.

  This is how they think. Not in words but in images.

  Then he stopped. Completely still. Cold and cool. He felt, and somehow knew, that he was a long way underground. As he adjusted to the dark, a lambent glow rose from clumps of moss around the room, but he still sensed more than saw a vast root system all around him—huge, gnarled, twisting tubes of organic matter shooting up, down, and out in every direction.

  It occurred to him that perhaps he had just “traveled” here along, through, or by way of one of these root tubes. And that he might, if he so chose, be able to similarly move out along any of the countless other tubes that now surrounded him.

  And follow them to wherever they might lead, which he sensed could take him to just about anywhere in the Never-Was. He knew there was a word for this, and it floated up in his head…

  Omnipresence.

  Then other images, springing from some defined outside source, began to flow into the stream of his consciousness, and as he filtered them into a more manageable context, he found that they added up to thoughts:

  This is “home.” This is “who we are.” They are “all one.” These life-forms share a collective “mind.”

  So Ajay was right. At this most fundamental level, they were all connected. And he had apparently made contact with its source or center; he imagined that Jericho might call it their “great spirit.” Will took a deep breath and decided to lean in a little more firmly, project himself farther, until he reached the point where “they” turned into—

  We. We are One.

  He perceived this not through words but by means of crystal-clear pictures that conveyed its ideas. Almost like hieroglyphs. Many he didn’t know and couldn’t at first penetrate their meanings. But he found that the few he could translate came to him without effort, and slowly others began to follow, until a series of more complete thoughts fell into place.

  We fear Them. The Ones Above. They are the Makers. The Ones who Came After. After the Beginning.

  They Changed Us.

  Will decided to ask a question in return, constructing it with the same symbols: Who are They?

  The images that came back to him depicted the beings they called “Makers” directly—tall, forbidding shapes, monolithic, cloaked in shrouds of darkness, their faces hidden deep in shadow. Groups of them, towering over them with sinister intent. Fear rushed up inside Will.

  A wealth of emotion flowed into him—the plants’ feelings felt less alien to him than anything else about them—and Will realized that he was now receiving the story of their entire existence.

  He witnessed their process of creation itself, as these beings moved from an idea of life, a blueprint realized through some mystical means of construction into primitive physical forms that slowly, ever so slowly began to evolve, bursting out of the ground, in light and life and the awakening of their senses, then a long period, through endless cycles of life and death—physically dying but never extinguished, living on through the strength of a kind of enduring spiritual blueprint—a long and peaceful existence.

  Then, out of nowhere, a wrenching, violent disruption—he realized the things were being torn away from their roots. Transported into some sterile, completely foreign, largely metallic environment. Deprived of nutrition, water, and natural light, dissected, ripped apart and stitched back together in some kind of hideous, heartless experimentation.

  Will felt as if a wave of fire broke over him, with a blast of searing pain that nearly doubled him over. There were no borders between him and these creatures any longer. He felt what they felt, knew what they knew:

  They Changed Us.

  Something else was part of their nature now. Some distinct, unwanted other. In that anguish, he felt a strange and powerful pang of kinship to these creatures.

  I know how you feel, brother.

  And somewhere during that exchange, he also received the clear impression he could open a deeper dialogue with them.

  So he asked, this time using pictures of his own, like a one-year-old struggling with the elementary building blocks of language:

  Where are Makers?

  Immediately the answer came back to him in multiple visions of the Never-Was. A flood of them, streaming in so fast that he struggled to process them coherently.

  He saw some kind of vast fortress or city—the word citadel came to mind—built on an epic scale, dug into rolling hills in front of a majestic, snowcapped range of craggy mountains. Not remotely like anything they’d seen in the zone so far.

  So far, so good. So he asked another.

  Where is…and then he thought of Coach Jericho, summoning up an image for him.

  …the Bear Man?

  He could almost feel the spirits’ collective “mind” calculating—sending out the question as tendrils of thought along its serpentine underground network of roots, moving faster than electricity—and an answer came just as quickly back to him, as an image.

  The Bear Man, in a very specific sort of location. And with it, the reassuring idea that it wasn’t far away from where they were now.

  But not exactly safe from harm. Far from it.

  Then one last question:

  Where is…and he showed them the best image he could think of for Dave.

  The Man with Wings.

  Again, a pause as the question flowed outward. The image that came back was considerably less encouraging than the last.

  The Citadel.

  The Man with Wings was inside that citadel.

  Will uncoupled his connection to the plant spirit “mind,” which had the effect of abruptly letting go of his end of a long, taut rope. He felt himself falling backward, a long, long way, and then he blacked out.

  WILL’S RULES FOR LIVING #8:

  DO THE RIGHT THING, ALWAYS, AND RISK THE CONSEQUENCES.

  He must have been out for only a moment. Elise’s face, looking down at him with concern, was the first sight that greeted him. She saw the experience in his eyes; then he knew that she sensed it in his mind as she caught a taste of where he’d been, a fleeting aura of that strangeness from his communion with that foreign consciousness.

  Wow. Aja
y was right.

  So were you, he replied. They think, they feel, they share a single mind.

  Remind you of anyone?

  Reminds me of a few people I know.

  “So, dude, what did Little Susie Sunflower have to share?” asked Nick. “Complaints about the aphids, or how hard it is to find a good dental plan?”

  “No,” said Will, sitting up, waiting for his head to clear. “But it did tell me where we can find Coach Jericho.”

  “What, for real?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “So we were right!” Ajay clapped his hands together and gave Elise a high five. “Collective mind, I knew it!”

  For the moment, Will decided not to tell them about where it had told him they could find Dave. Before he mentioned a word to the others, he wanted to discuss that bad news with Coach Jericho.

  But first they had to find him, and based on what he’d just seen, they had to do it fast.

  “Come on, guys, we need to hurry,” said Will, rising and shouldering his pack.

  Elise and Ajay picked up their packs and trudged after him toward the woods. Nick lingered.

  “But what about my big bouquet?” asked Nick.

  “Unless you want to be solely responsible for them from here on out, young man, you’re going to have to let them go,” said Elise.

  “It’s not really practical right now, Nick,” said Will.

  “Catch and release, man,” said Ajay. “You can always pick another bunch later. Maybe we’ll happen across a gigantic vase.”

  “It’s the only humane thing to do anyway, right?” asked Elise, seeing that Nick looked distressed.

  “Except most trout don’t try to jump back out of the stream into the boat and bite your leg off,” said Ajay.

  Will looked at the still-cowering flowers. It was hard not to see them completely differently now—as lost and pitiable creatures, their natures twisted into perversions of their original innocent state through no fault, choice, or action of their own.

  Like us in more ways than one.

  Nick walked over to his huddled, shuddering herd. He actually looked kind of sad. And so, in a strange way, did the flowers, which had seemed so feral and ferocious minutes earlier. They dipped their heads submissively and made no aggressive moves toward Nick as he untied the knot on his rope—