The Crest

Danielle spoke to her two colleagues in the main communications laboratory. "Another vicious attack last night. Reports are still coming in, but we estimate that there were one-thousand attackers last night. Our defenses held, thank God."

"They're testing the wall, probing for weaknesses on the Crest. My guess is that they'll use this information when the big invasion comes." Fernando said.

"We need to be cognizant. I'll talk to the Crest commander again. Anyways, what have you guys got for me?” Danielle asked.

“The plants alerted us again, but we’re not sure why,” Fernando said.

“Well, we know why. We were attacked. Plants can detect VOCs and other hormones pretty quickly in the air. Remember, they are stationary so they’ve evolved pretty sophisticated mechanisms to compensate for that. They must have picked up the mortar attack when it first started,” Danielle noted.

“But the plants alerted us a full hour before the attack on the Crest.”

“Wow, now that's interesting. An early warning system from the trees.” Danielle noted.

“My guess is that they detected human scents coming out of sweat and sebaceous glands.”

“Our seedlings are learning? I mean, why now? Why not other attacks?”

“The seedlings are growing. They have a fully functioning vascular system; their xylem and phloem bundles have developed considerably more than last year.”

“That could be but they couldn’t have made such massive leaps in learning and with the whole nursery at the same time?”

“I think they have, remember they’re connected to the same mycorrhiza network. My hunch is that the plants started learning after we began broadcasting their frequencies over the transmitters. Remember we’ve sent out their own signals at 20 Hz for over a month now.”

“Are you saying that the plants learned from us?” Danielle asked.

“Anything seems likely, especially the way the seedlings are acting.”

“How do you speculate the plants picked up human hormones five miles away, before the enemy attacked us?” she asked.

“That’s one-thousand men exuding adrenalin, cortisol, and testosterone that night. My guess is that the trees on the outside signaled the trees on the inside.”

“The larger trees picked up the human hormones?” she inquired.

“Why not? They easily pick up VOCs, and as you just said, plants are stationary, they can’t move and so they evolved alternative measures of communication and detection of their enemies. It’s easy to conceive that an acacia tree on the African savanna a million years ago could detect a band of humans walking nearby.”

“You’ve thrown a lot at me. You’re saying that we trained these plants with a 20 Hz frequency and they responded back with a similar infrasonic frequency? Then you suggest that trees picked up human hormones outside the enclave and signaled to those on the inside that an attack was imminent. God, Fernando, you’re killing me with your speculation.”

“I’m not posting it as a fact, I’m just trying to make sense of it. Remember we sent out a 20 Hz signal, and we received back a 20 Hz signal. Doesn’t that sound odd to you?”

“Could be the enemy sending a signal back to us?”

“Possibly, but remember the Antisis are mostly low-tech anti-science types. I doubt if they could figure it out.”

“Why now though? Let’s go with your hypothesis for discussion. Why alert humans now? Plants have been interacting with humans for over ten million years and there is every evidence that humans and plants co-evolved together.”

“Think about it, Danielle. The climate crisis threatens to wipe out whole swaths of species including the trees of the Pacific Northwest. We stand to become a savanna in the future. Maybe the plants know they are in peril and they know that their best shot is to make a partnership with humans in order to save their own kind.”

“God, Fernando, your bundling of random scientific facts is frustrating me to no end,” Danielle said, frustrated.

“Not so fast, you asked me what I thought happened.”

“Sorry, go on.”

“The trees know that if FORC goes down, then they go down too. It’s that simple. Take it for what it’s worth, certainly unsubstantiated, but I think the trees on the outside are betting on FORC to succeed, these great spikes in communication we’ve been receiving are intentional. We’re interacting because the plants let us.”

Danielle stood with her arms crossed. As usual, she was skeptical of her two top researchers.

"We'll continue this discussion at a later date." She turned and abruptly walked out of the laboratory.