Undermind
Amid moss and leaf litter, is a number 5. Metres across, edges sharp, well-defined as if printed onto the forest floor in Times New Roman. Oihana approaches, tentative, her footsteps muted by the soft loam.
It’s early. Not long past dawn. Absently, she glances at her wrist. A pale band of skin, shielded from sunlight until very recently. Her watch is lost. It belongs to the forest now. Just like her.
The number is bright white against the dark soil. A stencil? Why? Who? There are no other humans for hundreds of kilometres. Squinting, she peers around. No footsteps. No tyre tracks. She stares into the undergrowth, uneasy, while stepping back to her trailer, brushing a couple of stray vines from a solar panel.
She fills a kettle with water from the rain catchers. It clatters onto an electric stove, and she retrieves a teacup from amid a heap of notebooks, adding a pinch of freshly picked and dried tea.
This was an outpost once. A team of researchers, botanists and mycologists, working closely. Cooperation. The same way this forest had survived for millions of years. Trees working in concert, strong aiding the weak. All linked by a mesh of fungal filaments under the soil. Mycelium. Billions of trees, talking via trillions of connections, like synapses in a vast brain.
The others had left gradually. When research grants stopped coming. When universities had closed down. During the evacuations. They were in safe zones by now. Perhaps in the new cities in Antarctica. Quietly, Oihana pours her tea, taking it outside.
Crouching to look closer, she gasps. Plants her cup onto the loam, tea sloshing. She touches a finger to the 5. Fine filaments. Mycelium. She looks at her naked wrist, then into the forest, her mind full of questions.