The Crest

Danielle awoke in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. The nightmare left her breathless, her heart beat erratically. She thought she might be on the verge of cardiac arrest. Just what I fucking need right now, she thought.

She took deep breaths, in and out, in and out; her blood pressure back to normal. She realized she suffered over Dennis, and she needed to find closure to his death. There had to be some meaning. But what? she thought.

She’d had serious dreams since he passed, but now they seemed to be getting increasingly intense. He didn’t speak to her this time, she remembered. Odd, she thought. Dennis haunted her dreams for almost a year but now… it was something else.

She remembered the sound. In her dream, she saw the mother tree and heard the sequence. The sound was like a code. There was a dit sound and a dah sound. That was it, that was what she could remember, dit and dah.

She sat up and took in deep breaths at the side of her cot. In, out, in, out, slowly her scientific brain took over. She’d spent the last few nights sleeping on the cot in her office at the research center, not even bothering to go back to her dorm room. There’d been so many emergencies and she’d fallen behind in her research writing. She filled the night summarizing and editing research reports. Yet, despite the dystopian days they lived in, the paperwork never ceased. Some things never change, she thought.

She tried to recall the dream before it faded. “Jesus Christ. What could it mean? Things were happening fast in FORC. Amazing research came in and communication with the seedlings was well… phenomenal to say the least.”

“I’m spending way too much time in the office,” she said out loud.

She closed her eyes again and tried to remember the imagery. It seemed that a specific group of trees was talking to her. A warning of some sort? she speculated.

She got up and walked outside. The searing winds blew dust across the foothills as far as she could see. She’d remembered how June used to be a mild 72 degrees F, sometimes rainy but often the weather was Mediterranean, with mild days and cool nights. Now, in June they had this 90-degree nonsense, and dust storms, not to mention the sporadic heat domes that reached 120 degrees F and scorched every drop of water out of the vegetation.

Her mind returned to the nightmare and the sounds she heard…. the code. She tried to rationalize the science of it all. She thought about the research, she gathered that plants communicated underground by fungal relationships in their roots called mycorrhiza. Plants could transmit electricity across their leaves and across gaps, from tree to tree. They communicated by sound both ultrasonic and infrasonic and now, incredibly, in the audible range of humans. She’d heard the clicks herself, but still couldn’t believe it—but Karl and Fernando had proven it.

She knew that the Germans, Israelis, and Canadians were firmly on board with ultrasonic. She wanted to embrace audible communication, but she held back, waiting for more data. You just got your bloody data, her inner voice screamed.

Nope, always more numbers, that was her way, always waiting, the careful scientist, the cautious researcher. Don’t upset the apple cart without good cause, she thought. She recognized that if trees and plants really communicated by audible sound, as they now apparently could, and if humans could decipher their code and communicate back, then all bets were off. That is, the science world would be flipped on its head and the concept of plants being these passive organisms would be destroyed forever. It would usher in a new era of plant dialectology, and who knows what else.

She began mumbling to herself. “Jesus, there would be microphones attached to every plant. Biologists would become plant linguists, trying to decipher clicks, clacks, squeals, squeaks, and every random sound coming out of a plant. Plant physiology textbooks would become obsolete."

She thought about the deeper ramifications. My god, it would be a race to decode new languages. Each species could have its own vernacular. Her mind galloped.

She was hot. “God, it’s like fucking Singapore around here,” she cursed. She checked the outside temperature, 91 degrees F. “It’s only 5 a.m., what the hell?”

She continued through the communication checklist again. She knew the plants made sounds when they were injured or undergoing some sort of water stress, like drought. The amazing thing about the international research was the detection of shrieks at about 11 per hour during a drought simulation. They let out up to 25 mini-squawks if they were injured. She thought about the international researchers who worked on that study. Pretty outlandish back in 2019, but now in 2023, researchers detected sounds in a lot of plants.

She returned to her nightmare. The only thing she could think of was Morse Code. Really just dots and dashes. She thought, old but effective. She thought about what Karl showed her the day before. Possibly she just dreamed about Morse Code based on what he told her…or maybe not.

She proceeded back inside and prepared for the day.