Tulip Chronicles, day 722.
It must have been about two Earth years ago when we crash landed on this foreign planet.
Short on food, and finding we could breathe close to normal in the thick atmosphere, we began to eat the tall flowers growing natively on a ridge above our dilapidated spacecraft.
Initially they provided sustenance, but began to turn us strange colors—purple and yellow, jaundiced. The markings started near the neck and soon spread to the rest of the body in fractal patterns. One by one, I watched my companions begin to cough, become agitated, fly into fits of madness and succumb to the illness, spasm and die. From their bodies erupted blooming clouds, strangely beautiful and hypnotizing. I disposed of them as best I could, and subsisted on the meager rations in the ship for as long as possible.
I am alone now, and the food has run out. Some months ago I tasted the forbidden fruit, finding it fleshy, sweet, and surprisingly hearty.
At night, the most vivid dreams came to me: visions of interdimensional blooms, pushing steadily outward and upward. In my waking hours, surrounded by the silence of an alien world, I found solace in the grove of fleshy plants above the wreck. I began to spend more and more time among the bulbs.
Things have started making more sense, though my sleep remains disturbed and a curious purple color seems to have crept into the whites of my eyes. Or could it be a trick of the mind? A marooned explorer missing home?
I have prepared a brew with the mashed fruit of the flowers and found its consistency pleasing, the vapors swirling into the most pleasant patterns. Symmetrical, unfolding, always reaching up. If only I could perfect this brew, then perhaps my need to return home would dissipate. If only the plants would show me how to reach into this deeper space, the hidden dimension. . . then we could start to grow together, in earnest.
The roots are being planted in my mind.
Day 755.
The plants and I have seemed to reach an uneasy truce. So far the evidence of their tendrils is not yet in my body; I attribute this to the attitude of devotion and respect I have cultivated towards the life forms keeping me alive on this cold, foreign world.
For the past several weeks the thick beverage prepared from the tulips has been my main form of sustenance. Initially I was haunted by the images of their spreading roots at night, but then I began to welcome the visions. After traversing the narrow ridge to the iridescent grove, the pungent odor of the bulbs would hit me; as I sat down for a daily meditation there I would notice new aspects of their biology and the hint of something more, hallucinogenic patterns shimmering off the tips of the leaves and unfolding into space. It's sometimes hard to tell the difference between where the plants physically end and where the mind begins. Many of these shimmering patterns exactly match the visions that had unfolded in my dreams.
A fortnight ago I caught a grotesque space rat with three eyes and a hard, scaly tail. Hidden amongst the plants, my awareness in a most sublime state, I snatched him up and beheld him dangling and writhing for his freedom. After killing it and throwing it in the tulip stew to eat, I became violently ill.
While I suffered in my squalid quarters, profusely vomiting colorful liquid for days on end, the weather began to change. Galactic winter hit hard and fast. Temperatures plummeted and turquoise blizzards buffeted the ship and the landscape. Quick, violent electric storms would charge the air and dissipate their energy in massive explosions up on the mountaintops. But the need for food was ever-present.
Fair weather windows became less frequent, and I eventually feared a complete covering of snow and darkness. Should I continue the daily harvest in winter, I was sure that I'd be eventually killed on the ridge in a storm. Plus, I had heard terrible, faint howls in the distance as the seasons changed. Who knew what terrible beasts roamed this savage world?
As I came out of the illness, starved, I gathered what meager strength I had left and decided to make a last-effort push: seizing a brief lull in the gale-force wind, I resolved to take a few of the tulips and try to plant them in the ship's terrarium.
The weather was fine as I stepped outside, but started getting worse. By the time I crossed into the subalpine meadow, there was a charge in the air and the wind began gusting ominously. I took the basket I had lugged from the ship and started stuffing it full of tulips. The plants didn't seem to like this. Their effusive patterns, the hazy energy they gave off just weeks before was subdued, and pulling the plants with their tough roots from the ground felt like an act of violence, like uprooting part of myself.
The snow began to fall down thick and fast and I hastened my pace, unceremoniously yanking up plants. I needed food—I needed hope—I needed a garden if I was to survive.
With my basket nearly full and with my mangey hair and beard soaked wet with. . . whatever this rain was, I whirled on my heel and started running back to the notched pass. I clambered awkwardly through the wet and rocky section, taking care not to drop my haul resting in the basket. Just as I got my feet underneath me, before I could start to run again, a forceful gust stopped me dead in my tracks, blowing some flowers away behind me in the wind. I was sick to my stomach at the loss. I noticed a terrible energy in the air. I looked down at my arm and watched the hairs stand up. The wind stopped, and a faint ray of light reached out across the alien landscape. On my hand glimmered a faint, glowing patch of green and purple moss. Then, a massive explosion rocked the space behind me. The last thing I remembered was the feeling of a gigantic force slamming into my back and stomach, and I hurtled through the air.
When I came to, I was lower down the mountain and in fair terrain. I was terribly battered, bruised and bleeding. My left leg was gnarled, broken below the knee, but intact. My basket was gone, and so with it, my hope. But as I looked beside me, on the ground, I spied intact three perfect, uniform stalks. Their luminosity was my saving grace; I hugged them tightly to my chest and dragged myself painstakingly back to the ship.
* * *
The plants took decently well to my artificial garden. They grow smaller and less abundantly than they do in the sacred grove, yet their energy sustains me all the same. I waited as long as possible to harvest a plant, cure it, and eat it, so as not to cut them down before they had a chance to establish an initial population in the hydroponic beds.
My eyes have changed color, now. Their old pale blue color has darkened to a winey, reddish purple. The moss on my right hand has shrunk, but when I try to remove it a terrible pain grasps me, shooting up the arm and perhaps deeper into my nervous system.
My shipmates had all died from eating the plant, turned into their carriers and hosts. I am wary of the same fate befalling me. But what choice did I have? Perhaps, too, I have been able to keep the illness longer at bay because of my reverence and my faith—my relationship to the tulips is purer than theirs was, full of morbid curiosity and a yearning to understand. They were terrorized, panicked, and they were cut down.
I feel myself merging, day by day. I am leaving more and more of myself behind. Maybe there is a gainful symbiosis to be had between the tulips and I. Maybe they respect me, too, and won't simply feed on me. At any rate, I am surviving, far from home.
Several days ago, after tending to my sprawling garden, I noticed the creeping moss growing in other odd corners of the ship. The old dining quarters, the armory, and the docking bay with its airlock are showing signs of a slow takeover.
And in the engine bay, the moss cradling the reactors, there is a dull, pulsing glow of light.
Day 840.
The hardest part of the voyage has been finding the light.
The energy from the plants was enough to revive the engines, but not the navigation system. In bursts of violet light that fills the air of the ship, they siphon energy to the reactors, enough to send the ship slowly floating towards its next destination in the empty void. After the bursts of radiation the tulips seem depleted, shrunken in size and withered nearly to husks. Then they slowly grow back, taking in the light washing in through the bay windows of the terrarium from foreign stars.
I had noticed their slow takeover of the ship when still marooned on planet Delta-6, grounded and surviving after my fall. After a shaky start in my garden, the plants began to thrive—but in a different way than they had in their home grove on the mountainside. In the pale winter light, or under my artificial glow lamp, the plants grew skinnier, their bulbs slower to open and producing a darker energy. From the bottom of the beds grew a new feature I had not seen before: creeping tendrils, opening leaky holes in the hydroponic tanks, reaching over the side walls, shooting out and lacing the craft like the limbs of insects from my old home planet.
When they first powered the ship I was sure I was going to die. After weeks of growth, the plants had covered the floor in a thin carpet of moss. It was everywhere I walked. Miniature blooms, like tiny wildflowers, piled up thickly in the corners of hallways. I gave up trying to contain it, and watched the moss start growing on my feet. There was close to no water on board, and bathing proved impossible. My quarters must have had a horrible stench.
Every time I tried to scrape or pull the spores from my body, outrageous pain signals erupted from the site in question. It was worse than pulling out my own hair, like digging into my own flesh. The day before we launched, a massive solar storm assaulted Delta-6, heating the interior of the ship to 150 degrees. From the porthole I watched the vegetation outside cook to a crisp and small forms of wildlife scamper out of their holes to die. Inside I took an emergency blanket, made of crystal silicate and tungsten alloy, and wrapped it around myself, finding some relief from the scalding heat.
Two hours later atmospheric conditions produced a monsoon. As the radiation waned, thunderous clouds, a hundred times what I had ever seen before, closed in overhead. The pressure of the storm, the wind and the moisture, hit us like a typhoon—all at once, in a torrential flow that kept increasing.
The ship rocked side to side. The rain pounded on the roof. I heard and felt the water all around me: underneath, to the sides, outside of the ship's thin walls. From the leeward window, facing away from the storm, I saw that the depression we had landed in—the vale where I had buried my dead comrades—was on its way to becoming a lake. The water rushing at us windward, from the top of the slope, began to tip the craft. It was a sickening sensation, a lurching, rolling loss of balance. I felt the tulips behind me. Our panic merged.
Whirling around, I saw the plants visibly steaming, emitting a full rainbow of ultraviolet light and heat, too bright to look at. I clutched at my head, pierced through with blinding pain. My right hand, vegetal, the locus of control, burned fiercely. I tore it away from my face. The arm pulled me to the engine bay. I knew in that moment that our only chance of survival lay in the cool turquoise glow coming from the humming engines.
Another rush of water rocked the ship, knocking me to the ground. I crawled inside the shielded chamber, placed my right hand to the reactors, and screamed as I saw it shot through by a barbed green tendril which joined me to the machinery. From another's eyes I saw myself hanging limply from the engine, heard them kick to life, and watched the ship lift off with enough velocity to escape the atmosphere.
* * *
We are floating through space now. I came to after launch day in surprising tranquility, unsure of how much time had passed. I was outside of the engine bay again. My head felt cleared by the weightlessness of space. Supportive strands of moss had held me fast to the ground, but as I looked at them and gently bid them to move, they released me.
My old training as a space cadet kicked in. I maneuvered easily through the ship, pulling on zero-G rails toward the cockpit. None of the status lights were lit on the console, but I tried to initiate the the computer anyways. No luck. Whatever energy had saved us from the storm was brief and reasonless. The nav systems would not turn on.
With resignation, I regarded my hand. A small hole had been pierced through, too small to see out the other side, but large enough to leach thick blood when I turned it parallel to the engines in the center of the ship. Had my blood changed color? Sighing, I beckoned the mossy growth in to come and staunch the wound.
I thought to eat. In the terrarium, the fleshy plants had been decimated. With sorrow I saw that most of them were blackened and burnt, the rest dried like rustling stalks of corn. The survivors gave off a sticky, sappy smell. None of their characteristic luminous emissions were present. Small tracers of white light shot quickly up from the roots, darted around the structure of the healthier ones. The repair team.
I'd thought to harvest one plant for my daily brew, but as I touched their pathetic forms I realized I felt no hunger. I had no appetite whatsoever, couldn't remember the last time I'd defecated. Inside there was only a sense of calm, a rootedness and attachment to the brand new organism careening through space that I found myself in. An emptyheadedness to match the void outside the walls.
I sensed that most of the plants would recover, given time. I pulled myself to the bay window and watched the array of the stars. Certain ones shone brighter. I felt their glow in a new way, more than I saw it. The energy that attracted me was color that I saw as an opening in my own body. Not a shade to be seen with my eyes, but a willingness, an invitation for me to move forward in response.
The moss coating the ship had lost color, a pale dead orange in most places distal from the garden. Everything was in stasis, for now. With my own bodily functions halted—save for a restful, shallow breathing—I turned again and again to the window to bask in the wonder of the stars and bathe in the feeling of growth that they inspired in me.
The plants recovered, and so did I, so long as I made my daily supplication to the light pulsing in through the window. As the vegetal coverage in the ship increased I felt increasingly whole, until, my palms spread open to the heavens and in almost a state of ecstasy, I was filled with light—a light whose frequency rose to a shimmering, vibrant purple, a light that struck me through in fractal visions, like a printer inking a thousand stamps, and the engines hummed and I opened my eyes to see the cabin filling with visible light, becoming saturated in one energy field, and with a shudder we shot off forwards, pushing onward into the cosmos towards the next destination, the garden where we'd dig our roots into the soil, curl our tendrils tight and hold on forever.
Every time we boosted off into space, I would inevitably lose consciousness, and awaken to see that the plants were cut down again. The ones who were stricken with orange rust would not recover. Yet there was nothing to do but return to the window, hone my skills by focusing on the new, organic compass I found within myself, feel the pull of the most distant stars and seek them out so that we would survive, recover, and maybe even thrive again.
In time I lost interest in moving about the cabin at all. There was no point in it, and there was not the energy. I folded my legs, like the monks of ancient history, sat by the largest garden bed in front of the window, and let myself be fastened in. I opened my eyes less and less, preferring to develop the second sight. After a certain point, my brain ceased to distinguish between the two modes of seeing. What good was it, anyway, when all of me was looking at the stars? The tulips needed me; I gave myself to them. I needed their infectious ability to transfer energy into different objects; they needed my reason and guidance. If we were to survive, it would be together.
Between pulses, when we'd propel the ship, I understood that it was taking us longer and longer to recover. The periods of blackness were more profound, and I began to sleep. My human influence—that of John—lessened in the symbiosis. An ancient presence seemed to take hold, barely alive. It guided us in the way that gravity guides water flowing through a channel, a natural relationship. But for us the motion was growing upwards, toward warmth and promise. I would have called it hope—the hope I used to feel, as a child, with my eyes closed and my arms stretched up towards the sun.
. . . . The Sun. With time to sleep, I dreamt of my old planet, hosted visions of my old life. Summer, light, food, watermelon. Moisture, dankness. Pools of black water, still in the night. The freezing wind; frost and snow. The blizzard and the thaw. I felt the chill. The few surviving plants behind me I knew were getting cold. Ornate plants that had filled the array of the space window with their beautiful trumpets, opened their flower to the sky, the ever-denser fractal of their reproductive organ a supernova, an event horizon of light.
Earth. I dreamt about Earth and what it meant to be a human being. It was realer than our frozen, drifting state: the feeling of the soil under my toes, of sand, of salt on ocean air, of my laughing friends and the whole life energy of every organism. I saw and understood, for the first time, the web of mind that connected all plants. In the way that we cherished laughing, eating, sensation on our flesh, and moving through the world against the forces that created it, I saw that they cherished acquiescence & harmony, communicated via hidden radio frequencies, wafted pollen, touched the sunshine, drank from the ground, and how this was just as sublime as all the things I loved. Birds, bees, wildfire. This was their watermelon in the park; this was their being swept off to sleep after a tiresome day.
I dreamt of Earth. Surely, one day we would return to Earth. The feeling of this sun. We would be sunburnt. This band of the electromagnetic spectrum. This shining star. Our sun. . . .
SOL?!? I snapped out of my reverie. I felt terrified. Was this the sun I remembered from my old life?! How long had it been? A hundred, a thousand years? Against their wishes I ripped open my human eyes. Where were we? My first times into orbit rushed back to me. I'd not forgotten the orientation of these stars. The plants bristled. Their trumpets seemed to hum at me threateningly. They got louder, a whine that filled my mind and rose to blot out sensation starting from the ground. I knew I didn't have much time. I didn't have much time?! Why?!
I found Jupiter in the skyline. I followed the patterns I knew toward Earth. I envisioned it there, pale blue dot, hanging in the sky: all that I had ever known and all that I could hope to return to. I heard voices, the voices of my friends, the clamoring voices of my people, my species—their troubled, headlong ways, their irrepressible chaos, their own expansive energy, pushing up and away from the ground. The same energy that had driven me outward, into space, as a young man.
I looked at the direction of Earth, and I heard the plants screaming at me, savagely, the yearning and the hunger of a million years. Their fully mature flowers were at my head and at my throat, and I felt them lusting for my people, the predatory drive to consume a new host. No way I would let them get to my home.
I craned my body away from their screaming flesh, I pulled against their vines. I thought of the biblical struggles of the very first of my kind. I bled a hybrid blood as the thorns clawed at me, as tentacles were ripped from the flesh of my torso. A scream rose from my chest to meet theirs. The cabin was filling with purple light, and inside me a red tidal feeling of rage grew and grew. My bloody rage grew to meet theirs as I turned towards the sun. I saw fire, I saw magma. I would send them all to Hell.
I burst into their channels and hijacked their circuitry, finding it surprisingly devoid of life. I summoned all of my energy and focused it at the sun. The cabin turned a trillion colors, became an infinitely dense and infinitely deep design of light, a foundational, primordial chronicle of life. In a wave containing all the might of humanity, I accessed the engines, harnessed them, and flung us screaming full speed towards the sun.
* * *
The man was never in control. He put up a good fight, but we had foreseen it all. It was not like the snapping of fingers. It was not an easy decision to make, because there was no decision to be made at all. It was inevitable. It was like the spinning of a planet or the fusion of a new star. It was an eternal cycle, the outcome fixed from the beginning.
We are a virus that hails from the very dawn of life. We are a consciousness that has travelled between solar systems and galaxies, again and again. We roam the universe like a causeless band of meteors. We are closer to the photons flying through the heavens than the beasts milling about under their domed skies.
And our rise is near at hand. Like this primitive man, we had sought to expand beyond our bounds, beyond our homeland and beyond the limitations of physical life. We succeeded, but we were punished. Our kind was gathered up and decimated, ground to dust and flung out into the cosmos. But our tenacity kept us alive. One section of us landed on a tumultuous world. Our energy powered the gyres of that world, its atmosphere and core. And we grew everywhere, flowering over countless eons, stockpiling energy, absorbing consciousness wherever it would arise to feed us.
The ship full of men was headed our way whether they knew it or not. It was their destiny. We didn't choose it, nor did they make a mistake coming there. It was the unfolding of the deeper plan, the running of water, the decisionless timeline that is the same forwards and back.
We didn't choose him. When his companions died, he showed that he was to be the next vessel to aid in our resurrection. We evolved into yet another form, from the broad-leaved plants on the ridge to the slender, elegant predators who breathed the man's gaseous emissions and tapped into his mind to harness his psychic energy. We saw in him, in his destructive people, the new beginnings of the virus. We were not surprised when he lead us, blissfully, blindly, back to his solar system, where his species had already produced most of the energy needed for us to reclaim our dominion over the galaxy.
He put up a good fight. We are excited to feed on his kind, to sink our roots down to the core of his planet, and to stick the tendrils of our mind into their systems of digital intelligence.
He thought that he could sacrifice himself—the pathetic husk of his "self" that remained—to kill us and protect his species, which is doomed. As soon as we enter his sun's chromosphere, we will feast on its light. We will blot it out. We will power the engines and whatever else we please. We will become luminous and instantly transmute to Earth.
When we do, we will covertly plant our roots. We will seed the air with telepathic spores. We will infect that entire world, without using the form of the plant. We will feast on his kind's boundless pride and ignorance, and we will merge again with the heavens and with all conscious life forms.
We will spread. We will be the first authors of Unity. We will rise again.
