Post
by jayphailey » Wed Oct 23, 2024 8:01 am
Lydia: "It was another sunny day in L.A. You know how that is. You get so you take it for granted after a while. I fished up the dishes and I felt tired. Very tired. My whole right side hurt. I lay down on the couch to take a nap. Just a little one to get my breath. I fell asleep, and then I woke up in a pod."
"I was naked. Bald. There was a white man, there, too. And a robot called a Quellor."
The Pods looked like giant leaves of some tropical plant. I was embarrassed. I didn't know where I was. Gavin had no more ide than I did. He tried to fist fight the robot about it.
We were in a glade, near a forest. A creek rolled past not far away. There were six big trees. They looked sort of like those Keebler elf trees. They had doors and windows in them, that looked they were grown as part of the tree."
The Robot was babbling. I couldn't understand a word. He said there were clothes inside the trees. I ran into the nearest one.
I didn't notice until later, the Tree felt happy to have me. I ran in there, there was womens clothing there. It was old. Hadn't been touched in a while. A Chemists bench. Other stuff.
What I learned was that these trees were... like intelligent. They were made to be houses. They were happy when they had someone to take care of. I hope my tree there is okay. They were telepathic. You could ask them for things, and they had some sort of maker. A builder there. If you could describe what you wanted clearly enough, the tree could give it to you.
My first set of clothing out of there looked like it was made of leaves. Worked well enough. The tree used tree-thinking to build stuff. So if you rushed it or gave vague orders, you got a tree's interpretation of it.
Gavin eventually asked his tree to make him a gun. It took a long long time. And when it was done, I swear the metal had grain in it like wood. And little veins like the leaves have. It worked fine, but Gavin was so mad.
So anyway. The tree can make us food and stuff. And it loves to do that. I noticed the prior tenant left some stuff that was tree made and some stuff that wasn't. Her chemistry glassware had the tree patterns in it. I guess she wasn't as picky.
Eventually we got the Robot to tell us what happened.
He'd been damaged and didn't remember a lot. Just that he had a people maker and had to make people to fight the shape shifters. He had a cave full of these crystals. A lined up in pockets in the walls. He said that somerthing recorded people into these crystals. Then the Robot would take the crystals and put them into the people maker and then it would grow a new person around the crystal.
The Robot said if we died, to bring the crystal from our heads back and he could regrow us.
He told us that there was a great Commonwealth covering uncountable worlds, until the shape shifters destroyed it. And the war was going badly. All I wanted was to go home. I didn't know anything about any shapeshifters or Commonwealth or Worlds or any of that. Gavin agreed, but he looked like he was ready to shoot it out with the shape shifters right there.
He was crazy. He told me his Earth was dying. He and his kids wandered and hunted and scaveneged after something really bad happened. He was the kind of man who goes up in the woods with his family and builds a bunker.