Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

None of it unsettled her. In fact, it seemed strangely normal, the diametric opposite of what she’d experienced back at the club. The tattooed guy’s appearance had brought on a toxic sensory assault. This made her feel...

Welcome. That was only way she could have articulated it, but the word fell miles short of describing things. It was like she’d been invited into some larger, greater awareness. And it was everything good she remembered about the Glowing.

Bryan went deeper into the woods, woofing one granola bar after another, stuffing their empty wrappers in his pocket. The path had grown rugged and uneven and clumped with fallen branches and knuckled, bulging roots. But he clearly knew where he was going, and Natasha sensed he liked guiding her around the obstacles and pitfalls. There was something about him, a confidence he’d never shown away from a computer station. Or possibly she just hadn’t noticed before. Either way, it heightened her strange-normal, calm-elated state of mind.

After a while, he paused on the trail and gestured off to the right. “You see that mound?” he asked.

She looked through the trees. It was a few yards south in the forest, a low hump of soil littered with branches and prickly scrub.

“Yeah,” she said.

“There’s a pit behind it,” he said. “The Chacaguans used to dig holes for dumping their trash, then shovel the soil back in when they were full. But when they abandoned the island, a bunch were left open. That one’s got all kinds of interesting stuff in it. We can check it out later. After you meet Rhea.”

“Who?”

“C’mon,” he said, waving her forward.

They wound farther up the trail. Then she noticed a huge conifer up ahead. It stood to the left, towering above the rest of the trees. As they drew close, Bryan slowed down again, then stopped in its outspread shadow. She estimated they had gone about two hundred yards from where they’d left the kayak.

“Wild guess number three,” she said. “Is this Rhea?”

Bryan nodded. “Rhea, the red spruce. Chacagua’s ninety percent red spruces. But she’s the tallest and most mature. An anchor tree. Some scientists call her a mother tree because she feeds saplings all over the island. And can send them different kinds of messages.”

Natasha’s gaze rose up the tree’s massive trunk to its bottom limbs, then climbed on toward its thick upper branches. It stood over two hundred feet tall and looked ancient. Like the trees back in the old-growth forests of Uzbekistan.

Bryan motioned down to the thick lateral roots spread out like fingers from the base of the trunk. Natasha saw small, light brown toadstools clustered in the spaces between them. She wasn’t at all surprised to see they gave off a radiance, like everything else around her.

“They’re mycorrhizal fungi,” he said. “The mushrooms are the parts that grow above ground...but the underground parts of the fungi are like threads growing around the tree roots. They connect them. All across the island. For miles. They’re like web portals.”

She looked at him. “So that’s your Internet of Trees.”

He nodded. “It’s called a mycorrhizal network, if you want to be technical,” he said. “I might’ve skipped a few details. But I tried to explain the major stuff.”

She smiled inside. A few details. He’d gone on nonstop for almost half an hour, delving into its conceptual ins and outs, giving her a whole scientific journal’s worth of specifics.

“No worries,” she said. “I think you covered it fine.”

He stood there looking proud of himself.

Natasha’s eyes returned to the rough, furrowed tree trunk. There were tiny plastic pods imbedded in the bark. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them going up and down the tree in vertical rows, all strung together by wire-thin, fiber-optic cables.

She touched one of the pods, her fingertip completely covering it.

“A microsensor packet.” She studied the trunk. “The tree’s wired top to bottom.”

He nodded. “The trees are social. They’re all communicating. All the time. It’s a social network. And the NOAA scientists are listening. If a tree falls in this forest, they hear it.”

She turned to him.

“Bry, is this your mother’s ‘little project’?”

He smiled and nodded.

“She calls it the Chacagua Experiment,” he said. “Now I’ll tell you what it’s all about...”

It was all about the trees. And right now, they were literally talking up a storm.

On the island’s southeast side, above the shell beach, the barometric pressure around the maples had undergone a series of incremental drops over the past hour. As it fell below the pressure in their intercellular membranes, their sap began seeping outward through their trunks, branches and roots.

This activity was picked up by the microsensors and digitally transmitted off-island.

Burrowed inside the tree roots, a colony of arbuscular mycorhizzal fungi began to feed on sugars within the slow flow of sap. Their digestive processes rapidly broke the sugars down into chemical components, like phosphorous and nitrogen, then routed them through the soil with a web of microscopic, hair-like filaments, transferring them between and into the roots of other trees.

To the fungi, carbohydrate junkies, those chemical byproducts of the sugar were unwanted waste. To the trees, they were vital nutrients. It was a symbiotic relationship that had evolved 400 million years ago in the Devonian age, before the giant reptiles walked the earth.

This exchange of nutrients was also registered and relayed by the sensors.

Meanwhile, other biogeochemical exchanges were happening deep down in Chacagua’s soil. The whole ecosystem was abuzz. Signal chemicals were released; electrical pulses discharged; readings taken and sent.

The transfer of information and nutrients was most intense in and around Rhea. A gigantic data hub, the mother tree’s deep roots were boosting the throughput from one end of Chacagua to the other. If the maples were a communal food factory kicked into sudden, accelerated production by minute atmospheric changes, then Rhea was spreading the news and sharing the resources.

But there was another message in the network chatter. High on the evergreen branches, cones began to close up tight, their scales folding inward as if curling