The Man Who Hungered for Trees
The Man Who Hungered for Trees
Jun’ichi Fujisaku
“No. I’m cultivating them. Cultivating…the trees…”
***
Paul Anderson had vanished.
In other words, this was a missing persons case.
Paul Anderson. Forty-nine. Male. Occupation: game programmer.
A bit of a genius.
The company I worked for had sent me to his flat to see if he’d left anything behind.
Me?
Sorry, forgot to introduce myself.
I’m Alan. Alan Hiiragi. I’m half-Japanese, half a mix of different European nations. My parents and grandmother never
really looked into our genealogy. If I tried tracing the family tree, I’d probably be able to figure out where the mixed bits of me came from. Oh well.
I was an assistant director at the company that employed Paul.
I documented plans dreamed up by my boss, Jock. I helped record the motion capture, made sure we ironed out the bugs, and managed the overall workload for the designers and programmers. I wasn’t much good at any of these gigs. As a result, I spent a lot of time with exasperated people. That’s how I ended up being Jock’s errand boy, the one who took care of weird jobs like this one.
Recently, my odd jobs had included looking after Paul Anderson, who’d managed to make himself vital to the company.
Paul’s programming was unique, even for our team.
While the other programmers were all using high-level languages like C#, he alone refused to write in anything but assembly language. This meant they charged him with writing any program engines that placed a heavy load directly on the hardware.
Without the engines Paul made for us, the other programmers’ gorgeous character actions and flashy effects would never bloom. You could say he laid down the data-retrieval roots needed to cultivate those flowers.
It was dull work and always under the radar. Not only was it boring, but Paul also had to deal with impossible requests from upstairs. He had to feel his way forward through trial and error, with no end in sight. Even if he managed to finish the engine, the platform specs would change without warning and render all his work useless. But Paul never complained about any of it. He took it all on with glee.
He never set foot outside. He just holed up in his flat, hunched over a monitor. He’d stare fixedly at the screen for long hours, the silence punctuated by sporadic, furious bursts of typing like he’d just remembered he had a keyboard.
He seemed to take no interest in anything but work.
Nobody understood Paul.
Paul’s personality was not the only incomprehensible thing; nobody understood his code, either.
Most programmers would leave comments in the code, but Paul never commented once. To decipher his work, you had to track each individual command and do a full structural analysis of these massive files, files which may not even work at all.
Yet when Paul said one of these incomprehensible programs was done, it ran efficiently, its results better than what we’d anticipated.
Everyone called it magic.
But our mage was gone, leaving behind an old flat in Edinburgh.
After all I’d done for him, he’d just disappeared with no warning.
Edinburgh is part of the United Kingdom but not part of England.
It’s the capital city of Scotland. Edinburgh Castle stands atop Castle Rock, surveying the surrounding countryside. The wild hills of Holyrood Park lie in the center of those ancient streets.
Paul lived in an old flat with a grand view of those hills. His flat was in an ancient, four-story building. All the surrounding buildings had similar exteriors.
The company had offered him a nice flat near our office, but he liked Edinburgh. He refused to leave the place he’d lived for years.
There was an old creek out back and a small shared backyard. Even the shed in that yard looked like it was doing its part to sell the old Edinburgh feel. I’d often seen a stray cat from God knows where napping on the shed roof. It was a nice, fat cat, which meant the residents must have been feeding it. It dragged one foot behind it when it walked, so perhaps it had broken that leg at some point. I hadn’t seen the cat lately. Maybe its owner had found it. Or perhaps the city pound had taken it.
I’d often seen Paul stop his work and gaze out this window.
You wouldn’t call the flat large, so the view was the only thing really worth looking at.
The flat had a bedroom, a shower, and his office—which also functioned as the living room, dining room, and kitchen. All the furniture had been pushed together, converted to a section that housed his rack of computers and dev kits. You could just barely get past this to access the kitchen.
The fridge was a repository for the frozen dinners I bought. The kitchen existed solely to heat those dinners up in the microwave.
Given the sheer number of computers in use, Paul had laid down an array of extension cords designed to pull power from different circuits around the flat. His electric bills were always pretty nuts, but work took care of them.
He was that important to us. Unlike me. I could be easily replaced.
As if reading my mind, the smartphone in my pocket vibrated.
“Hello?” I said.
“Alan, you recover anything?”
“Jock. No, I just got here.”
My boss, Jock, was one of the company’s high-profile directors. He’d developed a smash hit fantasy RPG in the past. These days, though, he was known for upturning the entire game plan on a whim. Most people detested him.
But Jock had a very high opinion of Paul’s skills. When faced with a drastic spec change, few programmers would grin happily and say, “I’ll just make it again.”
“Paul must have hidden the original program files somewhere. Find them! Don’t come back until you do, got it?” he snapped.
“I know.”
“You only have this job because of Paul.”
“I know that, too.” I sighed, hung up, and stared at what had once been Paul’s holy domain.
After Paul’s disappearance, we’d copied the hard drives of every computer here and taken them to the office. If Paul showed up again and found we’d taken all his systems, he’d be furious. He really hated anyone else touching his machines.
So I’d always been careful not to touch.
Always.
I’d brought him daily necessities, discovering him always hard at work at his desk. I felt like I’d only ever seen his back. Or, occasionally, his profile as he stared out at the yard.
If I spoke to him, he never answered with anything more complicated than yes or no.
My presence mattered no more to him than a single chat line in an instant messenger program. So long as I did not set foot in the holy realm around his desk, he never raised his voice.
But one time…
I’d gone out to the yard to clear my head and had absently put my hand on the shed door.
A booming voice had echoed from his flat.
“Don’t touch the neighbors!”
That was the only time I’d heard him yell.
I’d looked up to find him beet red, a color I had never seen him turn before or since.
I’d left the garden and gone up to his room. There, I’d found him back at work, displaying only his back or his profile once more.
What had he meant by “neighbors?” Did the shed belong to someone in another flat?
“Well. I can’t leave until I get this done.”
I fired up Paul’s work computer with the magic key.
“Ha ha. It’s just the company admin password.”
An individual accessing a PC was just a single user account, tied together under the admin rights. Naturally, Paul had been given the broad rights of an admin and been free to do as he pleased.
But Paul had had no interest in security.
After all, nobody could understand the code he wrote.
Any kind of data is structured like a big tree, with many branches reaching out from one big trunk. Each individual only works on and understands the branch to which they’re assigned. Everyone touches the vital trunk.
Companies are structured the same way.
When you get down to it, society itself is no different.
My job now was to hunt for insects on each individual leaf and every branch. Unfortunately, every leaf looked the same to me.
Most programs were organized in individual files according to their function. Those files got pulled as that function was needed, over and over again.
Main routines called for sub routines. There was a clear command structure and a program that managed those commands.
“And my main routine is Jock,” I said.
All he had to do was tell me what to do, really.
The main program managed the others, and the fastest approach was to track that main one down.
But Paul’s code was unique, lacking the comments anyone else’s would have.
You needed specialist knowledge to decipher it and the ability to figure out what would happen after each jump.
All I could do was grab a notepad and draw a chart of the links between one file and another, sketching lines between the names. I couldn’t understand any of it.
They’d called him a genius programmer, a mage. He’d kept this all in his head.
Just trying to comprehend all this with my thoroughly average mind made me dizzy.
Dizzying workloads always contained traps filled with sleep spells.
I fell straight into one.
“Alan, you have no talent.”
Paul stared coldly at me.
“You should have quit years ago.”
Oh. This was a dream.
I realized it right away.
This conversation had happened last month and was now replaying as one of my memories.
“You have no idea what I’m doing, do you?”
What had I said in return?
I felt like I’d said something, but I doubt I’d argued his point.
“I’m cultivating them. Cultivating the…”
Right.
I’d said we were growing something.
And Paul had looked out at the garden wearing a rare smile.
Rustle…
Something touched my arm, waking me.
The monitor screen was the room’s sole light. Darkness shrouded the corners.
It was night outside. Only a distant streetlight’s feeble glow seeped in through the window.
I’d fallen asleep, and a touch had woken me.
Something had brushed against me. I remembered how it felt.
It felt like fur.
“A rat?” I muttered.
It was an old flat.
It wouldn’t be at all strange for rats or mice to live here. I’d never seen any such creatures skulking around while that cat was in the garden. But now that the cat was gone, the rodents’ numbers had increased.
That rat might still be watching me somewhere.
Rats carried disease. They chewed through electric cables. I didn’t want any trouble with these machines.
“I’ll have to buy some rat poison tomorrow.”
I’d fallen asleep working. Clearly my body wanted me to get a good night’s rest and start again in daylight.
I was not built for all-nighters.
When I woke the next morning, I went to the local grocery, intending to buy things to handle the rats.
But I’d never bought anything like that before.
Come to think of it, I’d never had a need for that sort of thing before.
The city council might send an exterminator, but Jock would never permit anyone from outside our company to enter that flat now.
So without knowing what I was doing, I bought some old-fashioned mousetraps and a few cryptically labeled poisons. Struggling with the weight of the bag, I sat on a bench between the grocery and the flat and stared up at the gray skies of Edinburgh.
“I should have bought some ale,” I muttered.
No telling how long this job would take me.
If I didn’t find some way to relax myself, I felt like I’d never get anywhere.
Nutrition was important.
“You’ve been touched!”
A dark voice whispered at my shoulder.
I spun around to find a boy in a black coat standing not two steps away. He had even features but darkness in his eyes. He stared, as if observing my reaction.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“My name…what was it? It doesn’t matter. You should leave that place. They’re a quick study,” he said.
They?
“You know something?”
“You still have time. Consider yourself warned,” he said.
Time? What did that mean?
As I considered this, the boy vanished into thin air.
Had I been seeing things?
I had definitely not slept enough. I’d gone to bed after that weird sensation crept over my arm, but sleep had evaded me.
I knew something else was in that flat.
I’d never touched a rat before. I couldn’t be sure I’d felt a rat’s fur.
It had seemed softer than I’d imagined a rat would be…
I could feel that sensation on my arm again.
“It’ll be fine. I bought a lot of traps.”
The mousetraps in the bag felt like my own personal knights.
But…
You should leave.
That strange boy’s words bothered me.
By “they,” did he mean the rats?
But what kind of rat was a quick study? That didn’t make any sense.
Back at the flat, I quickly set traps in the places I thought rats would go and under any furniture I thought they might hide. I moved all the food into the fridge. I doubted rats would be able to open the heavy fridge door.
Just in case, I made sure there weren’t any large gaps in the windows and doors.
The windows were good.
The gap under the door was only a few millimeters high.
I didn’t think a rat could get though that.
With this taken care of, I sat down before Paul’s computer.
Once again, I began tediously chasing the jumps to other files.
Perhaps Paul’s disappearance was no big mystery.
Maybe he simply hadn’t been able to take this crap any longer.
Maybe he’d just bailed.
I sure as hell wanted to run for the hills as I sat in this room with only the screen and the window for company.
Paul was the type of guy who took a break from writing one program by writing a different program? It was perfectly reasonable to think he’d had enough.
But how could he program so flawlessly without leaving a single note behind?
Here I was, squinting at files, making checklists, and the files were turning into a veritable spider’s web.
The bulk of them were complex programming loops, transferring data from register to register and releasing it.
These points collected to form a line, giving the whole thing shape.
I couldn’t see the specific shape, but the information’s movement clearly laid the foundation for something.
Each program was a point, and as the links between them formed a line, I began to see the picture those lines formed.
“What did you want to make, Paul?” I said.
I’d never wondered before.
Watching Paul program a game engine that talked directly to the hardware, that thought had never entered my head. I’d taken it for granted that this was what he did, and as his support I’d done only what I was ordered to do.
Trapped in this dull room, faced with this tedious task, for the first time ever I felt I had touched Paul’s mindset. Obviously, this work was not the whole of the man. Unless he had some larger goal, though, curiosity about the world outside should have driven him to open his door and leave long ago.
It was easy enough to do.
We hadn’t shut him in here.
He controlled the lock on his door.
Perhaps he called himself an escort every now and then without us knowing.
Obviously, this was a remote possibility.
If he’d been up to something like that, I’d have caught a glimpse of her. Maybe I’d have spied some traces she’d left behind.
But Paul had done nothing of the sort.
Had no intention of doing it.
Most of us, even if we liked our jobs, worked for some other reason.
Money.
Family.
Success.
It all ultimately came down to self-satisfaction, but I felt like Paul didn’t even have that.
Paul himself seemed to be just part of the program, here to carry out a task.
My notepad’s chart grew more and more complicated, turning into some sort of bizarre cypher.
I’d redrawn parts of it. Lines between programs were pointlessly doubled up or crossed out.
If someone besides me looked at it, they’d see meaningless scribbles.
“The opposite of Paul’s programs. The only thing the two have in common is that they don’t make any sense.”
I sighed, turned the page, and tried to clarify the chart.
If I didn’t clean this up now, it would only lead to trouble. I’d learned that lesson several times over.
“Jock’s yelled at me enough.”
I didn’t mind cleaning things up.
It was like resolving the sprawling mess in your head into something with clear shape and form.
To clean a chart, you reproduced the work without anything meaningless. You selected what to keep and removed all the clutter, leaving behind a single form.
“Although I’m nowhere close to done,” I said.
The new chart was much clearer.
No extra notes, no mistakes…
“Like Paul’s programs…hmm.”
I revisited Paul’s code on the computer screen.
Row after row of focused code.
If he’d deliberately removed all the comments…
Then a source version must exist.
But this computer didn’t have that data.
I could only think of two things.
First, he must have saved written notes somewhere.
And second, he must have a fully commented version of the program code saved.
But where?
I knew every inch of this flat.
The only part I hadn’t touched was his holy zone, but he couldn’t hide an entire computer there.
External memory?
Action was easier than thought.
I started searching the place.
An hour later the room was a lot cleaner, but I hadn’t found what I wanted.
The drawers contained no external hard drives, no USB memory, and no hand-scrawled notes.
I’d tried flipping the drawers, peering in the gaps between the walls, but had come up empty.
Maybe Paul really was a genius. A mage.
Had I discovered everything? No notes, no mistakes?
Maybe the originals Jock wanted had never existed.
Maybe the comments carved into Paul’s own memory were enough to handle any bug fixes or spec changes.
Out of ideas, all I could do was stare out the window like Paul had done.
The shed?
I glimpsed it in the corner of the garden.
The neighbors.
Paul had used that word.
He’d only ever showed strong emotion the one time I’d tried to open that shed.
I ran downstairs and tumbled into the garden.
I grabbed the shed door, shaking it violently.
Locked.
A combination lock.
Four discs that could be rotated from 0 to 9.
Any numbers that might have meaning?
“Yeah, not likely!”
I’d just have to work methodically from 0000 to 9999.
These locks had a simple pin with teeth on it. When lined up with the notches on the discs, the pin would move a little. To open this lock, you just had to start with the furthest dial, trying each digit until it moved.
It didn’t take long, partially due to luck. The lock opened to a simple 0123 combination.
That said a lot about Paul.
At least he’d had enough sense to not just set the thing to 0000.
“I guess it’s common sense to lock up what you want to keep hidden.”
I tossed the lock aside and opened the door. The rusty hinges squealed.
Inside, a burst of sweltering air met me, along with a sweet scent and bright lights.
I saw green.
Potted plants, every one of them my height, filled the shed to the brim.
There was an array of lights as bright as the sun and a watering system. That explained the heat and humidity.
Long, pointy leaves like fingers on a hand reached out from the stalks, which were arranged in a familiar pattern.
“This is cannabis,” I said.
Had Paul been growing this massive quantity of cannabis?
Cannabis. Marijuana. A common drug often smoked to give one an intoxicating high.
That was Paul’s secret.
Programming required a great deal of concentration, especially for a genius like Paul who kept all the designs in his head. Of course he’d use a booster like cannabis.
But pot smoke had a very specific and recognizable scent, and I’d never smelled that in his flat.
Was he dealing it on the side?
“No, Paul had more than enough money.”
I’d handled his day-to-day affairs, including his finances. He must have known I was too timid to ever take advantage of him.
He was right, too. I hadn’t touched a dime of his money. I had no reason to rob him, and I had a conscience.
But then…what was this for?
Surrounded by the stifling scent of the cannabis and the heat of the lamps, I looked around the shed in a daze.
In the back, beyond the sea of green pot leaves, a flat stone had been placed on the floor. Remnants of burned cannabis lay on top of it.
Weirdly, someone had spread the ashes in rings.
A burn mark stood in the center, like a black stain on the floor.
A stain so black it resembled a hole in the rock.
I stared at it, feeling like I was peering into another world…
“Ugh. My head.”
I shook off the stupor and staggered out of the shed.
After taking several deep breaths of Edinburgh air, my head felt clearer.
I glanced back inside the shed.
It felt like the black stain was watching me.
To cut off its gaze, I softly closed the doors.
Should I tell Jock about this?
That was my first question once I was back in the flat.
If I reported it, Jock would make the evidence disappear. Even if his star programmer was a pothead, Paul’s programs remained legit.
At the very least, Jock would make it clear that Paul’s cannabis habit had nothing to do with our company.
Maybe the pot had something to do with his disappearance?
“No.”
I dismissed that possibility right away.
If Paul’d been caught in a deal gone bad, they’d never have left all that pot just sitting there.
Maybe they were keeping it as a production facility. Then again, if anyone suspicious regularly went into the shed or had contact with Paul, even someone as dense as me would have noticed.
I didn’t think the answer could be so easily hidden.
All I’d seen was a forest of cannabis plants and that weird black stain.
No notes or computers.
When I looked back at the computer screen, the rows of characters began to wriggle, almost like they were dancing.
My head was still in a fog.
Maybe the fumes in that place had gotten to me.
“I should take a nap.”
I went to the bedroom and lay down.
“Alan, you have no talent.”
Oh. This dream again.
“You should have quit years ago.”
Paul’s voice sounded like it came from a great distance away.
I was still lying down, unable to move. As if I were dead.
“You have no idea what I’m doing, do you?” Paul asked.
“I do. You’re writing programs.”
“No. I’m cultivating them. Cultivating…the trees.”
By trees, did he mean those cannabis plants?
Were those the key to Paul’s programming?
Abruptly, I felt that sensation again, like something touching me all over.
How long had I been asleep?
It was still light outside. I heard cars passing in the street.
I’d had that dream again.
It had felt more vivid than the last time. So had that sensation.
I looked around the room but saw nothing.
Maybe I was still under the influence of that cannabis.
“Gotta get back to work,” I muttered.
What had Paul been doing?
I’d taken a few interesting detours, but it seemed like the fastest route was just to plod though his code.
My head spun at the idea.
But Jock didn’t intend to put anything else on my plate.
He’d assigned me to take care of Paul because he’d decided I was too useless for anything else.
Everyone said I was nice and earnest, but when it came to work I was a poor communicator. That made people mad. It always took me forever to draw up documentation, and the result was never easy to follow.
It was sort of baffling that I hadn’t just been fired. Really, they kept me around because they needed someone to take care of odd jobs like this. If our company were a great tree, I was a dangling twig primed to fall at any moment. But even I had my uses.
They could stick me with the work nobody else wanted.
“That’s what I do now.”
But if I wanted to keep my job, I had to get this job done.
I knew all of this, yet it didn’t upset me.
This was the only place I had.
I felt far more comfortable in this old flat than I did at a nice office desk.
This flat was basically mine now.
I’d taken it over from the missing owner.
That was all.
“Mmm. Time to work.”
I felt as if I had to say it aloud or I’d never do anything.
Forcing myself out of bed, I went to the living room. After I put on some coffee, I sat down at the computer.
“Gotta keep going…”
When I looked at the screen, my eyes froze.
“What. The…”
An open file displayed an unknown program.
Was I imagining things?
No…
I hadn’t opened any new files.
I found myself looking over my shoulder.
Had Paul returned?
No, I was the only one here.
Had someone snuck in while I was in the shed?
Even if they had, what kind of intruder wrote a bunch of new code and then left?
“Agh!” I cried as something rubbed against my leg.
I looked under the desk, but there was nothing there.
“A rat?” I gulped, searching the room for any signs of movement.
But there was nothing alive in here.
Maybe I was just too unperceptive to pick up on it.
I checked every mousetrap in the room, but none of them had sprung.
Donk.
“Yikes!”
Something bumped against my leg.
But when I looked down, nothing was there.
I held my breath, listened closely…
I couldn’t see anything.
I couldn’t hear anything.
But…
Tap.
Something touched my arm.
No…
It was still touching me.
Lightly.
It felt like a small hand resting on my arm.
Then the thing started climbing from my elbow to my shoulder.
“Go away!” I shouted, trying to brush this invisible thing away.
My hand struck something, knocking it off.
Did it hit the wall? Roll across the floor? If it did, it didn’t make a sound.
But it was here.
I couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t even smell it.
Beep. The computer made a small electronic noise, the sound of a file opening.
Edit windows opened and closed. A chain of letters appeared in the edit window.
It was assembly language code. Efficient code. Just like the code Paul wrote…
“Who?” I whispered.
In the face of all this madness, I clung to the belief that someone was doing this.
Someone could easily remote desktop into a computer.
But I had accessed this computer with admin rights, and I knew it wasn’t set up to allow remote desktop.
The keys themselves weren’t moving, yet code spilled out in the edit window.
Code that looked like an experienced programmer had written it. There was nothing wasted, not even a typo.
Open and close. Open and close.
The number of files grew.
“What is it writing?”
This question crossed my mind at last.
Something I couldn’t see or hear was writing a program.
There was another beep, and at last the programming stopped.
Hesitantly, I moved over to the computer, waving my hand over the keys.
I didn’t touch anything.
Whatever had been there was gone.
My knees buckled, and I collapsed to the floor.
“What the hell was that?” I gasped.
Mmm.
I couldn’t begin to describe it.
I could touch it, but I couldn’t see it.
But it was definitely here.
Whatever it was, it had written a program.
Paul, the genius programmer, the one we’d all called a mage, hadn’t written his code. It had been that thing.
Whatever it was.
To borrow a term from the local folklore, maybe it was some sort of goblin?
Maybe a faerie? An elf?
Unlike Jock, I didn’t know a lot about these things.
I didn’t know the difference between a gnome and a faerie, but I knew this thing wasn’t a normal part of our world.
Five minutes ago I would never have believed in something like this, but now I felt myself accepting it.
If I didn’t, I’d go crazy.
Could the cannabis I’d inhaled be causing these hallucinations?
Wishful thinking. I could tell my mind was working just fine.
I could easily recite the names of the kings of England. I could say my parents’ and grandparents’ names. I think. I’d forgotten their birthdays, though.
I really needed to calm down.
What were these things?
No point in thinking about that.
What were they doing?
Writing programs. Exactly like the ones Paul wrote.
What had they done to me?
Not clear. They’d scared but hadn’t harmed me.
I stared at the program the invisible faerie had written.
If Paul had always had them write his programs and pretended those programs were his…
If I did the same, maybe I could be the new Paul.
Though I wasn’t sure if their program would work.
Then…
I pressed the call button on my phone.
“I’m in a meeting,” Jock said.
“Jock. I found a new program Paul wrote.”
“Really?”
See? Jock jumped on it.
“I’m gonna keep looking. Mind if I stay here a while?”
“Go ahead. That’s what you should be doing. Looking forward to it,” he said.
I grinned.
Now he needed me.
Without me, Jock had no way of getting Paul’s…no, their programs.
Only I knew the secret.
Triumphant, I uploaded the program to the company servers.
“Alan, was there anything else? The other programmers are raving about this code,” Jock said.
“I’ll look.”
“Need any help?”
“Er, no. If Paul comes back and there’s a crowd here, he’ll flip,” I said.
“What?”
“Sorry.”
“No, you might be right. Then it’s up to you.”
“Right. Thank you.”
Now I’d secured my position.
Paul was gone, but if they were here, even I could…
There was just one problem.
Paul must have had some method of instruction telling them what programs to code.
If the programs were useless, Jock would drop me back to “worthless” status in no time flat.
Still, this secret was a weapon.
I finally had a weapon to call my own.
I had to find the right way to use it, though.
There had to be a trick.
That night, I began testing how these invisible, inaudible faeries worked.
All I knew for sure was that they’d write programs for a few minutes at noon and at midnight. Twice a day, they’d finish off several pieces of code.
I also knew that they ate food.
I’d found small bite marks on food I’d bought for myself. They looked like human bites but only the size of my thumb. The teeth marks even appeared on things inside the fridge.
The faeries mostly seemed to go for cheese and fish, things high in animal proteins. I found insect bites on the vegetables but not their teeth.
I searched online for information about faeries, and the results suggested that I had some sort of brownie.
Brownies lived in homes and would take care of housework when the owners were away.
“Then let’s call them brownies. Welcome, brownies!”
I wasn’t sure if they’d reacted to me.
But when midnight rolled around, programs started writing themselves on the screen. I guessed the brownies were still doing Paul’s job for him.
If they worked even with me here, that must mean they didn’t accept me as their new master.
As long as the brownies did not accept me as their new master, they wouldn’t do anything more for me.
I had to figure out the secret to making the brownies my weapon…
I looked out the window again.
“That shed,” I murmured.
That weird burn, the black stain at the back.
That stain had bothered me.
I could understand there being a charred mark from burned cannabis, but the burns stood in rings around a black stain in the center.
And I’d felt like something terrifying lurked inside of it.
If that wasn’t my imagination…
I went down to the shed and stood before the burn marks.
I felt like the cannabis plants had grown since yesterday. I covered my face with a handkerchief so the overwhelming odor didn’t mess with my head again. Breathing as shallowly as possible, I wormed my way through the plants, plucked a few leaves, and arranged them on top of the burn marks.
“Something will have to happen,” I said.
I lit the cannabis on fire.
The uniquely sweet scent of burning weed filled the air, and I felt light-headed.
I shook my head, trying to stay focused.
I had to watch closely…
The change came soon enough.
A black bud was born from the center of that stain, but this bud didn’t grow out of soil; it sprouted from rock.
I reached out and touched the bud lightly. It felt…slippery? I couldn’t quite describe it.
Some sticky fluid coated my finger. A strand stretched between my fingertip and the bud.
“What…is this?”
I sniffed. It smelled like soil mixed with something rotting, so unpleasant I turned and threw up in the pot of a nearby planter.
Behind the puddle of vomit, something thin and white peered out from beneath the soil.
“What’s that?”
I swallowed a few times, then brushed the soil away. Roots clustered around the white thing. I grabbed the stalk and yanked.
The roots came up, dislodging the earth around them and exposing what lay beneath.
“Bones,” I whispered.
It was a tiny animal skeleton, probably a rat.
A small piece of paper fluttered into the pot from which I’d pulled the bones.
It had been buried in this humid room, so the ink had bled. It was illegible.
I looked around at the green stalks growing from the planters.
“All of them?” I muttered.
I grabbed another stem and pulled.
More bones.
Once again, the cannabis roots had clustered around a small animal skeleton and another piece of paper.
I pulled up stalk after stalk, discovering more bones in the roots of each.
When I’d found my twentieth little skeleton, I finally stopped.
Every plant here had to have them.
I didn’t know how, but the cannabis plants were grown from these sacrificial animals. When their leaves burned…something happened.
Burning leaves granted the wishes written on these pieces of paper.
Perhaps this was how Paul told the brownies what sort of programs he needed…
I hurried back to the flat.
A new program had been written on the computer screen.
Burning the leaves of those cannabis plants had set the brownies to work.
They’d kept working in Paul’s absence because the instructions were still active.
And I’d just overwritten them.
Each of those cannabis plants was a subroutine, a massive archive Paul had left behind.
If I gave the brownies a new sacrifice, my orders might reach them.
That way these programs would become mine, not Paul’s.
“Worth a shot.”
The next day, I had a stroke of luck; one of the mousetraps I’d baited had caught a rat, leaving it barely alive.
Without hesitation, I put the rat in a pot. As an experiment, I wrote HELLO WORLD on a piece of paper, instructing the brownies to write the most basic program. Then I buried a budding cannabis seed on top of it.
Now I just had to wait for something to happen.
The results appeared far faster than I’d expected.
The cannabis plant grew with unnatural speed. Three days after I’d planted it, it had grown as tall as the other plants.
I plucked a few leaves, arranged them in a circle on the rock, and lit them on fire.
The smell of burning cannabis went right to my head, but I didn’t care.
At midnight that night, the computer screen displayed HELLO WORLD.
I’d activated my weapon.
I felt like King Arthur must have when he pulled Excalibur from that stone.
Riding that high, I called Jock.
“Jock, what sort of code are you looking for at the moment?” I asked.
Jock sounded a little surprised, but I told him I’d started to figure out the trick to Paul’s programs. My lie worked.
He asked for code to make rendering faster and memory management more efficient.
I could never begin to make that myself, but the brownies could.
I trapped more rats and buried them with seeds and paper detailing my requests.
Then I waited.
Like Paul, I stared out at the shed and imagined how the cannabis would grow…
“Why doesn’t it work? What am I doing wrong?”
I stared at the withered cannabis seed.
I’d planted the sacrifice, the paper with the request, and the budding seed just as I’d done before.
I pulled up the withered plant. The roots were strong, wrapped around the rat skeleton. I looked at the paper. Only the first few letters had blurred; the rest could be read as easily as when I’d buried it.
They’d accepted the sacrifice, but the request had not been processed.
“Was the sacrifice not large enough?”
I increased the number of traps, placing them not only in the flat but in the garden as well.
This paid off in spades. That night alone, I caught twice the total number of rats I’d caught so far.
I buried all the rats along with a new piece of paper and a fresh budding seed.
“It worked!”
Just as I’d hoped, this gamble had paid off.
The roots had dissolved the rats, leaving only the bones behind.
The instructions on the paper were completely illegible as well.
I plucked some cannabis leaves and began burning them again.
The bud poking its head out of the black stain grew visibly larger, far larger than it had for a single rat plant.
Increasing the volume of sacrifices made this grow faster. What would happen when it was fully grown?
Pondering this, I returned to the flat to find the new program code already on the screen.
Reading the code, I couldn’t be sure if it would work or not. I just sent it off and waited for Jock’s reply. Which came soon enough: everything had gone swimmingly.
I understood how the shed worked now, but that knowledge just raised more questions.
Like, what would even larger sacrifices do?
I remembered the cat that had once visited the garden.
“Oh. No way.”
I raced down to the shed and pulled the stalk of a plant from a larger pot. There, I found a different skeleton, one too big to be a rat.
The hind leg showed signs of a break.
It was that fat cat.
It hadn’t gone anywhere; Paul had sacrificed it.
To accomplish what?
I recalled the day I’d noticed the cat was missing. That same day, Paul had gotten a frantic phone call from Jock.
“There was a customization overhaul to match a change in hardware specs,” I muttered, remembering.
After that phone call, the cat vanished.
That was the day…
“You have no talent.”
That was the day Paul told me that.
“Don’t worry, Paul. I may not have any talent, but I’ve got something to make up for that,” I said.
If surpassing Paul only required a few sacrifices…
My phone rang.
“Yes, Jock?”
“Alan, we got a problem,” he said.
“What? Lay it on me.”
“New consumer platform specs have leaked. We want to match Paul’s speed booster program to them. Think you can find that?”
“Big job. I’ll take a look,” I said.
“Thanks. We’re counting on you.”
I hung up the phone, wondering what I should sacrifice for this.
For a job this big, I didn’t think even a cat would do. If a simple spec change had required a cat, something this massive would require far more complex programming.
I needed a sacrifice larger than a cat.
Maybe a dog?
Or a sheep?
No…
Something even bigger than that? A horse or a cow?
How would I ever get my hands on livestock?
I could probably arrange a dog, but I’d never seen any stray dogs around here. Probably why there were so many stray cats.
Something bigger…
Something this town was full of…
“Oh.”
Of course. People.
I stared down at my own shadow.
But was a shed the right place to bury that kind of sacrifice?
I scanned the planters and noticed one in the corner that displayed a large amount of stalks.
“Uh oh,” I whispered.
Had Paul already crossed that line?
But for what?
I pulled up one of the stalks.
Soil spilled to the floor as the roots came out. I inspected them…and saw a skeletal human hand.
“I knew it.”
Paul had crossed a line no one should ever cross.
To gain his wish, he’d sacrificed whatever it would take.
I plucked a few cannabis leaves from the plant and arranged them in a circle.
I wanted to know what request had required a sacrifice of this scale.
It took quite a number of leaves.
I set them on fire, and the sickly scent hit me hard.
My head swam.
If I could figure this out, I’d know all of Paul’s secrets: the cannabis in the shed, the sacrifices, his connection to the brownies.
You should have quit years ago, Paul’s voice whispered in my head.
No. I was hearing things.
I was high on cannabis.
Really stoned, actually. I couldn’t move a muscle.
Partly due to the cannabis but also partly from my own curiosity.
The last traces of sanity screamed at me.
Run!
“To hell with running.”
I’d finally got my hands on a real weapon, and now I had to master it.
I had to wrest control of it from Paul.
I’d see this out, as I’m sure Paul would have.
The sticky black bud blossomed, growing so tall I had to crane my neck to look at it.
The bloom stretched and grew until the stalk bent beneath its weight and stared down at me.
“Paul.”
I found myself saying his name.
Paul’s face lay in the center of the open bloom.
As if awakening from slumber, his eyes opened to stare at me.
I tried to tear my gaze away, but I couldn’t move. It was like my eyes were nailed to his face.
The Paul inside the flower spoke to me.
“Welcome, Alan,” he said.
I finally listened to that last trace of sanity.
Forcing my legs to move, I kicked the ground. I fell on my behind and thrashed my legs, managing to back away from flower Paul.
Then something brushed against my hand.
The invisible, inaudible brownies had arrived.
More and more of them touched my arms, my legs.
The brownies lifted me up, carrying me somewhere.
“No!” I yelled. But they didn’t listen.
As they carried me away, Paul said, “Now I can cross over. You’ll be cultivating this tree next.”
Cross over? Where?
Suddenly the brownies released me.
My body dropped.
I landed hard on my back. The force knocked the wind out of me, and my eyes filled with tears.
My vision blurring, I felt like I was trapped deep inside a tunnel.
Where was I?
Something began covering my body.
My hand grabbed…soil.
I was in a hole.
I was lying in a hole 50 centimeters deep.
I tried to calm my reeling mind, to analyze the situation. Panic would get me nowhere.
If I panicked…
Things I couldn’t see or hear kept piling dirt on top of me.
They were trying to bury me in this hole.
“Hey!” I shouted, but they kept working.
I tried to sit up, but I filled the hole perfectly. I couldn’t move.
The brownies piled more soil on top of me.
Dirt got in my mouth, flavorless and unpleasant.
I had to run, but the more I tried to struggle, the more the soil held on to me.
Paul’s words came back to me again.
“You should have quit years ago.”
He was right.
I should have admitted to Jock that I was useless.
Instead I’d gotten all puffed up. I’d pretended I could get results and had accomplished exactly nothing.
All I’d ever wanted was for somebody to tell me, “Thank you.”
But I’d never hear anyone say that now.
As I lay buried, I knew the truth: I was turning into one of the routines that guided this cannabis, the tree that controlled each of the subroutines.
The last thing I saw was Paul looking down at me.
He was no longer a flower.
It was the Paul I used to know.
He had a sticky gleam about him, much like a cannabis bud.
Maybe Paul himself had been that black bud.
“I was that bud,” he said, answering my query. “You were chosen as a sacrifice to replace my old body.”
Paul smiled down at me.
“Alan,” he said. “You are part of the tree now. You can never escape from the jungle I’ve created.”
No!
I tried to fight, but by now I was almost completely buried.
As soil covered the last of my head, Paul placed a sprouting seed beside me.
“Once you become a tree, you can travel to where the neighbors are.”
As he spoke, roots sprouted from my head and twined deep into my body.
I began to vanish wherever they touched, replaced with a new me, reborn as a cannabis plant.
I was becoming part of the program upon which the world ran…
***
From out of the night, a pair of dark eyes peered at the shed.
“Oh, well. I knew this would happen. He can’t say I didn’t warn him. It was a fascinating experiment. But someone’s bound to interrupt when this many people go missing. What a pain! I’d better collect before that happens…”
The voice, and its owner, vanished into the darkness.
The End