The Crest

Danielle was not well. The greenhouse attack messed her up bad; she was bruised, and nauseous. She took a codeine to address the pain but refused to take the day off, that was her way. She needed to see a doctor, but he was busy with other patients, so she put it off. She pictured the attacker again and grew more repulsed. Her loathing for the Antisis increased.

She avoided going near the greenhouse and refused to talk about the attack with anyone. It was business as usual. She kept her appointments and now she spoke with her university counterpart on their sat-phone. Their connection could not sustain itself for more than a few minutes at a time.

“Good morning, Walter. How is it going down there? she asked.

“Not good, Danielle, the Corvallis enclave is weakening. We’re getting hit hard. They’ve captured the high ground in Mac-Dunn Forest and now they’re pouring mortar rounds down on us, trying to break through. Any day now I guess.”

“What’s next, my friend?”

“Surrender or fight to the death. We’ve got a very determined group of scientists here so we’re not going anywhere. They’re pretty badass and needless to say, we’ll go down fighting.”

Danielle paused, distressed, not sure what to say. “Can your people make it to the Greater Portland enclave?”

“No way. We’ll be here until the end; such is the way of our profession these days. Anyway, we discovered something here, and I wanted you to know before —things go sideways.”

“Go ahead, Walter.”

“Well, we think we found a signal in the mycorrhiza.”

“What kind of signal?”

“It’s a distress call, confined to four chemicals in the mycelium.”

“Okay, go ahead.”

“Well, with the trees already stressed from the smoke and drought, we performed bioassays and then isolated the chemicals in the mycelium and then found a way to track them using a radioactive tracer. Get this,” he paused, “the tracer extended out thirty meters, almost instantaneously.”

“What’s the significance, I mean, mycorrhiza contains lots of chemicals? Hundreds in fact.”

“Correct, but these four seem to work in unison.”

“You traced these substances okay, so how do you know this is not a Doug-fir norm, I mean what’s changed? Plant-fungal networks are complex.”

“What’s changed is the speed at which they send the distress signals out. We’ve seen nothing like it. It’s almost a meter per second. I mean mycorrhiza symbiosis ancient, literally a 460-million-year-old interaction. But the speed of this is mind-blowing.”

“Why now Walter and by what pathway are we seeing this signal?”

“We think it is indole acetic acid, strigolactones acetylcholine, and in particular, jasmonate. Jasmonate often signals a plant defense response.”

“So, what’s your sample size?”

“Here’s the amazing thing. You won’t believe this. Once we figured out that these four hormones were indeed our guys, we could follow the tracer ten kilometers away.”

“Can’t be. Trees can’t communicate that fast. Hell, mycorrhizal networks take years to build.”

“Yes, that’s what we thought, but we were wrong. The mycorrhiza in our Doug-Firs have evolved rapidly. I’m talking a few months at most.”

“Evolved how?”

“A type of punctuated equilibrium, recently, like in the last decade. They’ve developed a more efficient way of communicating. Now, it’s almost instantaneous. A quick 911 system in trees. Ten kilometers was as far as our data tracked but it could be further, much further,” he noted.

“What was your control group?”

“A ground barrier separated our control group. There was no way that any plant-fungal associations could have communicated through that concrete barrier.”

“How many trees were affected?”

“Are you ready for this?”

“Shoot.”

“Almost two hundred. Larger ones, mature trees with well-developed networks. These are the old growth research trees we monitor regularly. We found that the signal extended from mature tree to mature tree. Do you know what this means?”

Danielle hesitated. “Not really, go ahead.”

“It means that if there are regularly spaced mature trees across a vast distance, they could signal each other quickly across hundreds of miles. That suggests that the signal that we induced yesterday has already reached Southern Oregon today.”

“Can you confirm that?”

“Of course not, not right now, all of our research posts are under attack. Fucking idiots.”

“Let me think this through.” She paused. “Plant-fungal associations mutually benefit each other and the ones you are talking about developed the ability to communicate with neighboring trees for alleviating stresses.”

“Correct,” Walter said.

“What’s in it for the mycorrhiza? I mean what do they get out of it?”

“They get living trees that provide them with nutrients.”

“And the trees, what do they get?” she asked.

“Of course, the trees get enhanced nutrient uptake and… a very efficient communication system across space,” he told her.

“Underground, there are many, many organic and inorganic compounds, like the ones you’ve suggested. Mycorrhizal networks are not the only mechanism for this underground communication.”

“Correct again, we know that there are multiple pathways for transmittance but generally mycorrhizal networks function to transmit signals about pests, genetics, toxins, even death.”

“What do you mean ‘death’?”

“When a tree dies, it sends out its nutrients to the young trees. It’s kind of an arbor inheritance. We know mycorrhizal networks transmit phosphorus, nitrogen, and water from dying plants to healthy young ones. Depending on the species up to forty percent of the nitrogen and fifty percent of the water can be transferred to the young ones,” Walter replied.

“So, are the mature trees you’ve tagged dying? If so, that could be an important part of this equation.”

“They’re not dying, they’re just stressed, trying to figure out their survival strategy.”

“In short, they are learning. This aligns with what we are picking up at FORC. The plants are communicating like crazy up here through a variety of mechanisms,” Danielle noted enthusiastically.

“In what ways?”

“What we are seeing is that drought-stressed trees are communicating faster and more efficiently than we ever thought through infrasonic, ultrasonic, and audible clicking noises at a 220 hertz, if you can believe it.”

“Your trees are producing audible? That completely messes with my mind.”

“Lots of things have changed, Walter, our theories about plant communication are now redundant and outdated. In a matter of weeks, we have torn up the book on plant evolution. I can’t explain it to you now, but with your mycorrhizal communication research, we are truly in unchartered territory. And it explains something else.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The signals might explain why we are seeing so many empaths at our doorstep,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yes, we think the mycorrhiza are producing pheromones, they’re coming out of the ground as a gas and directing the empaths.”

“Hmm, pheromones are airborne chemical messengers. You’re saying plants designed a pheromone for us humans.”

“Possibly an old co-evolutionary strategy that the plants are using now. We know nothing yet; we’re just following the evidence. Most animals detect pheromones through their vomeronasal organ. Pheromones are picked up by the organ and relayed to the hypothalamus.”

“We know human pheromones exist, but a plant to human pheromone is mind-boggling,” he said.

“The research doesn’t bear that out yet, but we think that the human hypothalamus becomes activated and the empaths are following a signal to the enclave, by smelling their way here, possibly subconsciously.”

Danielle made out bombing sounds coming from her sat-phone connection. “It sounds pretty crazy there in Corvallis, Walter.”

“Gotta go now, Danielle. I hope we can connect again.”

“Take care, Walter.” She turned off the sat-phone, wondering if she would ever hear the voice of her friend again.