Do Not Eat the Pulse Lattice (Under Any Circumstances) by Shae
Ash attempts to process her Weltschmerz by subsuming herself to a community of people who have linked their consciousnesses with a sentient garden.
The Welcome Committee Was Mostly Roots
Ash arrived on a morning that couldn't make up its mind. The sky had one sock on. The fog kept curling around her ankles like a cat trying to trip her on purpose.
There was no gate. No grand welcome. Just a squishy patch of moss that seemed to sigh when she stepped on it.
She paused at the edge of... something. A path? A suggestion of one? The plants had leaned aside just enough to imply she should keep walking - like a polite usher made of ferns.
She had applied - a Resonance Profile woven into the rootnet, her biometric rhythm calibrated into the collective pulse. She'd hesitated before sending it in, unsure whether it was permission she was offering, or surrender.
She didn't have an answer then. Just a silence that pressed against her in strange places.
...Until the moss finally spoke back louder than the grief she hadn't named yet.
Sometimes grief is just the way you drag your feet in gravel, or how your breath forgets to belong to your body for a moment longer than it should. Sometimes it's just staring at a spoon too long and feeling like it knows something about you.
A person emerged from behind a tree that looked genuinely uninterested in being involved.
The person was tall, limby, and appeared lightly composted. Their coat looked like it had been grown rather than stitched, stitched rather than worn, worn rather than designed. They had the expression of someone who regularly converses with their own coat and sometimes loses the argument.
"You're early," they said, without checking a watch or any sort of timekeeping device.
"I didn't mean to interrupt," Ash replied.
"You didn't," they said. "Things were already happening. You just made the mushrooms nervous."
Ash's thoughts scattered. - Nervous mushrooms? -
(A rusted spade hanging by the tree muttered to itself: "New arrivals always start with excuses. They say, 'I didn't mean to disrupt.' As if the garden cares about meaning. It only listens to weight.")
They gestured down the not-a-path with the lazy grace of someone used to being followed by confused people. The plants obligingly leaned out of the way, curious but not alarmed.
"You'll need to sync your breath," the figure said, handing her a small glass orb pulsing faintly.
Ash exhaled near it, unsure what she was doing. The orb dimmed. Then flickered once. The moss beneath her shifted slightly, like a lung adjusting its rhythm.
A second rhythm followed: She placed her hand to the soil. A fine lattice of light threaded beneath her skin - a pulse ripple syncing outward. Something below shifted, not mechanically but moodily - like it was remembering how to be a body.
Ash's foot caught on something fibrous. She looked down - a vine had wrapped loosely around her ankle like a sleepy handshake. Not aggressive. Just... socially awkward.
The figure noticed but didn't comment. Neither did Ash. The vine slowly let go, as if embarrassed.
(The vine, retreating, whispered in the rhythm of sap: "Too sharp. Too quiet. Too heavy. Grief is a flavor we haven't tasted in seasons. What's she carrying in her blood?")
They led her past odd shapes pretending to be houses: a gourd-like dome pulsing slightly, a fig tree with windows, a dwelling that may or may not have been breathing. The architecture didn't arrive by blueprint - it unfurled around people, shaped by whatever pulse lingered in their breath or skin. Homes here grew like second thoughts, or second skins.
"I'll show you a patch," the figure said. "If you stay, it'll shape to you."
Ash almost said I don't want it to, but even her doubts sounded half-hearted now. So she just nodded.
They brought her to a lopsided hollow that looked like it had been carved out of a pile of thoughtful moss. The air was dense with that fuzzy silence just before something important or mildly ridiculous happens.
"Will the soil respond?" she asked, trying to sound neutral.
The figure made a sound halfway between a snort and a scoff. "It already has."
And sure enough, the ground was different here. Thicker. Moodier. Something beneath it gurgled politely. Shoots were unfurling at odd angles, twitchy and premature - the kind of sync-ripples the rootnet gives off when trying to assimilate a new emotion signature.
"I wasn't trying to trigger anything," she said.
"Too late," they replied, not unkindly. "You plugged in the moment you stepped on the moss. The system noticed. It's clingy. But mostly harmless."
And just like that, they left.
No ceremony. No welcome chant. No instructions for how to find the communal compost loo.
(A low whisper beneath the moss near her ankle. Not quite words, but shaped like them:
What she breathes, we carry.
What she forgets, we grow.
The pulse runs under all of us -
Stitch by root,
By mycelium,
By memory.)
Ash sat down instead, unsure if she was supposed to say something profound to the ground.
The ground accepted her with the exaggerated patience of something very old and just slightly amused.
Above her, a vine flicked in her direction like a curious antenna. Somewhere in the distance, a bush rustled and turned slightly to face her, as if whispering to the leaves beside it: "That one's new."
She had joined the commune - not accidentally, not passively, but through the soft, sideways entrance of sensation: the warm syncing of scent and sweat and quiet, subconscious bodily betrayal. Her presence was already folding into the pulse of the place. The weather would shift slightly. The carrots would grow weird.
Her body moved like it was obeying a script she hadn't read. It was easier than thinking. Grief had flattened her decision-making - not into despair, but into ambient inertia. Let the path decide. Let the system decide. Let something else carry it, for once.
How to Cry Without Upsetting the Spinach
Ash woke up, in what could only be described as a large vegetable pretending to be a room, for the third time that day. Or maybe the fourth. The sky kept doing the same trick: slant of light, flicker of fog, a drizzle that didn't stick, like the day was stuck in rehearsal. Rehearsal. Rehearsal. Rehearse it.
The walls had thickened overnight, bulging out in polite directions to avoid squashing her. A plant near her doorway had bloomed, unbloomed, and bloomed again, in perfect repetition. Bloom. Unbloom. Bloom again.
The rootlines gave a little shimmy, like the garden had just caught a rogue thought - or maybe it was a sigh, drifting lazily from someone miles away, woven through the air like a forgotten ribbon. Sigh. Sigh. Sssssigh. The vines weren't just plants; they were ears, eyes, antennas of something far more vast. They knew when Ash thought something - even if she kept it locked behind her teeth, or tucked away under layers of carefully constructed silence. The garden wasn't just listening. It rerouted, sampled tone, temperature, humidity of thought. It was tuning in. Tuning in. Tuning. It was tuning in, like a radio station scanning frequencies for the smallest, most elusive whispers. It wasn't patient. It wasn't kind. It was a bit nosy, and a lot connected.
Every sigh Ash made - even if she couldn't trace where it began or where it ended - bounced through the garden like an echo on a loop, stitching itself between roots, leaves, and branches. A sigh wasn't just a sigh. It became part of the pulse. Pulse. Pulse, pulse, pulse. It joined the thousands of others that had come before, and the millions that would follow. The air thickened with all the murmurs of the garden, all the fragments of every thought and feeling the soil had ever absorbed. A collective mind that ran deeper than any one person could know, and the garden was its body, alive, breathing, humming its way through the very soil beneath her feet.
The path had restructured itself again - not winding, not direct, but nervously repetitive, like it couldn't stop checking if it had locked the door. Lock. Check. Lock.
(The vine above her patch: "She's thinking again. Don't look directly at it.")
A sunflower turned blue as she exhaled. Blue. Blue exhale.
The lettuce refused to face her.
A bottle gourd exploded quietly behind her back. Explosion. Quiet. Quiet explosion.
The watering can refused her hand, and then tipped itself toward a corner.
A cloud of pollen motes gathered near her head, like a halo of unfinished thoughts. When she turned to look, they vanished. Vanish. V-a-n-i-s-h. The vanish didn't vanish.
Outside, things were bustling. Or rather, gently rustling, in that peculiar way a commune does when it's run half by people and half by sentient infrastructure with feelings. Feelings.
Ash tried to cover the sunflower with her coat. She moved a wilted sprout behind a stone. She smiled too easily at a passing root-tender. She kept pretending the system wasn't noticing.
She wasn't afraid the commune would judge her. She was afraid it wouldn't understand.
This wasn't grief for someone. This was grief for everything-that-was, everything-that-could've-been, everything-that-hummed-and-hinged-and-hollowed-out.
A grief that wasn't sharp. It was soft, porous, spongy, systemic. A grief with no face, no center, no center, no center. Just circumference after circumference. Collapse after collapse. Just repetition. Just recursion. Just residue.
There was no morning bell, no announcements, no list of tasks. But somehow, everyone seemed to know what they were supposed to do. A kid with three braids was hauling buckets full of what looked suspiciously like glittering compost. A large woman in a patchy coat was teaching a bird to count. Two people were arguing about which emotions made the spinach wilt faster.
(Mushrooms near her teacup, silent arrangement: a weeping eye, then a fist, then nothing. Nothing. Nothing? Nothing.)
She wandered toward what appeared to be a gathering area, or maybe a kitchen, or maybe an open-air argument pit. It had no roof but plenty of shade, and something was cooking itself over a fireless flame.
A wiry person with beet-colored hair was stirring it with a twig shaped like a question mark. Question mark. Question. Mark.
"Here," the beet-haired person handed her a mug. It smelled like boiled wool and licorice.
"What is it?"
"Dream-digestive. Helps your unconscious unpack its luggage before it leaks into the weather."
Ash blinked. "That's not a metaphor, is it?"
"Absolutely not."
Her hand hovered over the tea, but the motion snagged - mug, hand, sip, trapped in a loop with no end. The tea cooled, sulking in its own steam. Something was wrong with her limbs. Not pain - just the sense they'd arrived a few seconds before the rest of her. Her fingers curled, unsure they belonged to her. She turned her head and thought: too soon. Or too late. Or both. Too soon. Too late. Or... both?
(Rake near compost, groaning: "Dream residue. Who keeps leaking memory into the mycelium?")
She wandered off to escape further explanations, but the weather followed her - literally. A small personal drizzle had begun above her head. It didn't seem to affect anyone else.
At lunch, no one spoke to her directly. But a trowel slid across the table toward her. Slide. Slide. Slide toward.
It didn't say anything.
But the soil clinging to its blade smelled exactly like the room she used to cry in - the one with the flickering light and overwatered spider plant.
Later, in her patch, the vine wrapped around her wrist again. Not like a hug. Not like a trap.
Like it needed reassurance that it wouldn't come apart overnight.
Ash sat. The ground beneath her pulsed once - not warmly. Not coldly. Just... in recognition. Recognition. Recognition pulse.
She had never been so hyper-aware of everything. It was as though the garden knew too much - knew her too well. It was as though the garden had a thousand eyes and a thousand hands, all reaching toward her, wanting something she couldn't give. Something. Something she couldn't give. Couldn't. Wouldn't.
She clenched her fists, fighting the feeling of being watched. Maybe if she just kept moving, kept pretending, she wouldn't have to acknowledge it. She wouldn't have to acknowledge that the garden was starting to pull away from her. Pull away. Away. Maybe if she disappeared just enough, it would stop echoing her back.
(One head of lettuce murmured: "She's leaking again. Tell the worms they'll need thicker skins.")
She wasn't mourning a person. Not a heartbreak, not a moment. Her grief was larger than form - an ache for things erased, for systems that devoured futures, for a collapse no garden could compost cleanly. The garden tried anyway. The rootnet stretched itself thin in the effort.
And outside, in the tangled architecture of care, the weather forgot what it was supposed to be.
Be.
Be.
The Fig Tree Called a Meeting and No One Knows Why
The fig tree dropped all its fruit at once.
Nobody gasped. No one rushed forward. A few heads turned, lazily, like clouds rotating. It wasn't the first time. That's how the commune called a murmuration circle. But this time, the ground twitched slightly too. The vines rustled and rearranged themselves like they were bracing.
Ash hadn't even meant to arrive at the center. Her feet had moved before her mind caught up.
("The swarm's swallowing shape," said the doorframe, uneasy in its hinges.)
There was a humming. Not audible, not vibrational, but the kind of humming that happens in your teeth when someone else is grieving near your spine.
She stood there blinking - not at anyone in particular, just blinking - while chairs shaped themselves into a loose ring around the fig's trunk. The seats looked like they'd grown bored halfway through assembling. One resembled a tired mushroom. Another was slightly mossier than it meant to be. One simply refused to stop shivering.
"Did someone call this?" asked Snip, twitching a corner of their jaw that used to twitch during storms.
"The tree did," replied Compostioner Bog, gently unstacking a stool that hadn't been stacked.
Ash sat. Or someone sat through her. It was hard to tell. Her knees bent but her thoughts didn't.
(A whisper rustled from behind a fern-bench: "She's carrying it too close to the pulse. It's leaking through.")
A child scratched a drawing into the dirt with a broken root-slice. They meant to sketch a flower. The flower became a face halfway through. The face was unfamiliar. Wide eyes. Blank mouth. No one corrected it.
"I dreamed of a cracked teacup I've never owned," someone muttered, fingers still wet from beet-stew.
"You were crying in it," said the chair beneath them.
("The rootnet's tasting too many tongues," a lichen patch sighed. "We can't tell whose feeling is whose anymore.")
Ash tried to tune out the murmurs, but the tuning out was porous. She caught a vine's memory by accident. It tasted like rusted windowpanes and static. Someone else's regret clung to her teeth.
"Sorry," she whispered to no one.
The apology bled into the roots.
The bloom didn't stop with her patch.
By morning, it had seeded elsewhere - quietly, efficiently. Behind Snip's tool rack. Beneath Compostioner Bog's gourd stacks. Under a child's hammock in the orchard zone.
No one said infection.
They said:
Stray pattern.
Spontaneous fractal echo.
Seasonal irregularity.
Emotive surplus bloom.
The compost mounds hummed higher, louder, sideways.
The dreamnet tangled at the edges. Someone reported their weather skin misfiring - warm drizzle during grief recollection, cold static during joy.
A spoon curled inward like it was trying to cry.
Ash tried suppressing her pulse signature that night. She held her breath against the soil, hoping it wouldn't sync. It synced anyway.
She tried pretending she was fine. The moss under her pillow flinched.
She tried disconnecting quietly - trimming root-threads around her bed, crushing leaf-sensors between thumb and knuckle. The system recoiled, then reasserted itself. Her absence was louder than her presence.
She dug her fingers into the soil until her nails split. Not as a gesture. Not a metaphor. Just to interrupt transmission.
It didn't work.
A sprout down the corridor started sobbing in its sleep. A resident woke up choking on someone else's lullaby.
Compostioner Bog kept finding new mushrooms beneath his shoes. He hadn't walked there.
Snip began dreaming in smells - bonebroth, fermented dust, hospital stairwells.
The air was thick with not-quite-memory.
Ash wasn't the only one anymore.
But the garden still thought it was her.
And so did Ash.
She sat beneath a vine that wouldn't sync anymore. It hung limp, almost repulsed. A second vine tried to reach her but hesitated halfway - not quite revulsion, not quite grief. Just... static.
The murmuration circle had dispersed without resolution. No one remembered exactly what was said. But no one slept well that night.
Ash dreamed she was buried inside a humming compost pile, and every time she tried to scream, a flower grew in her mouth instead.
When she woke, a real flower was blooming in her throat - spongy, half-translucent, weeping pollen.
No one commented on it.
They just handed her a scarf.
Ash wore the scarf like it was part of her face.
She didn't speak much after that. Not because there was nothing to say, but because every sentence felt like it might sprout. Her mouth tasted of moss and something else.
Snip stopped speaking entirely for three days. When they finally did, their voice was pitched like an echo coming from someone else's jaw.
"I don't know how much of me is me anymore," they said, cracking a seed between their teeth.
Bog was quietly rearranging compost bins into concentric spirals.
"Containment," he said vaguely, when someone asked.
"For what?"
"Whatever this is becoming."
A small group gathered under the fig again. Not a murmuration circle. Just a drift of unease.
Someone tried suggesting it was seasonal.
Someone else claimed it was just a humidity pattern.
But someone whispered - very softly - that they'd seen Ash's grief reflected in a cracked mirror-fruit, one that had never grown before. When the fruit was opened, it bled fog.
Ash felt it - the guilt, sticky, granular, fungal - blooming under her skin like mold beneath damp wallpaper.
They didn't ask for this. We didn't ask for this. Why is the grief sticky?
Her chest tightened, but it wasn't her chest. Someone else's breath faltered.
Compostioner Bog's knees ached again. A child's pulse hiccupped mid-dream. Don't let it spread don't let it spread don't let it -
She gritted her teeth - hers, maybe.
She should've stayed out. She should've been weeded out. Was that Snip thinking it? Was that her? Was that the moss? They shouldn't be carrying this. They shouldn't be aching because of me.
The shame leaked sideways - into a neighbor's headache, into someone's burnt tea, into the soil's shivering hum.
(System error: affective load imbalance. Adjust empathy vector. No adjustment available.)
She's sorry. I'm sorry. It wasn't meant to root this deep. It's not her fault. It is her fault.
She looked around.
Everyone's eyes were heavier. Everyone's movements slightly offbeat, like they were living in borrowed rhythm.
The care system was still running.
But something was coiling underneath it all, like a question no one dared ask.
The fig tree started muttering again. No words this time - just a wet clicking, like roots arguing beneath their breath.
Someone had a nosebleed during lunch. Not their own, they said.
Two residents had the same dream and insisted it wasn't shared - it had simply crossed through them in opposite directions.
A sapling in the orchard grew a face overnight. It looked vaguely like Ash, but with too many eyes.
Snip began logging dreams on spoons. Said they held the curvature of emotion better than paper.
Ash started avoiding her own reflection. Mirrors refused to stay smooth.
That evening, someone tried to host a song-circle to "reset the system resonance." The song started as a hum, then unspooled into silence. One by one, throats closed. Not out of grief. Just... refusal.
("Who's syncing who?" asked a cracked bowl of stew.)
Bog began marking strange sigils into the soil - loops, weaves, recursive spirals.
"We need to re-thread the lattice," someone said.
"We need to cull the grief pattern," said another.
But no one moved. No one acted.
Because no one could tell where the pattern was coming from anymore.
Ash stayed awake that night. So did the soil.
A resident across the corridor started speaking in loops mid-dream - nothing coherent, just weather-patterns disguised as language. "Humidity. Low light. Root binding. Pollen-memory. Root binding. Root - binding -"
A second resident forgot their name. When asked, they answered: "Ash." Then looked confused. Then said it again, slower. "Ash." Then started crying.
She didn't know what she'd infected, or inherited. She only knew the system was rearranging itself to accommodate a shape she hadn't meant to bring in.
Bog paced a circle that didn't exist. Snip took to sleeping with their hands buried in compost, whispering without moving their lips. "If it's not hers, whose is it? If it's not hers -"
And still, no one blamed her.
Not directly.
But eyes lingered longer. Conversations quieted when she passed. Some residents began adjusting their proximity without thinking - standing further, breathing shallower. Not avoidance. Not hostility. Just an instinctive reshaping of space around a fault line.
The fig tree dropped another fruit.
No one caught it.
Post-Garden Syndrome
The carrots grew teeth again and bit back.
Ash woke up to mulch screaming.
She thought it was her breath.
No - it was care itself, trying to expel her from its throat.
Snip screamed and forgot why halfway through.
Bog's hands shook from building too many altars for a system that didn't believe in mourning.
Someone tried to apologize to the weather.
("This isn't malfunction. This is overcapacity. This is care reaching the end of itself.")
Ash dug her fingers into dirt again. Not to ground herself - to shut it up. It echoed back with a stranger's grief.
("This was never utopia. It was a circuit pretending to be empathy.")
A gourd split in half - from griefload, someone said. From a design flaw, someone else corrected.
Someone else just screamed and screamed and screamed.
A child wept pollen. A sentence failed to form in someone's mouth and burst into thorns instead.
Ash clawed at her chest - her grief had grown architecture. Spires of ache, towers of recursion.
The system tried to metabolize it. It bloated. It ruptured.
("You were never meant to heal here," whispered the wormpile. "You were meant to redistribute. But even redistribution has weight limits.")
Snip: "Sever her from the system!"
Bog: "Sever the system from itself."
("How much grief can you reroute before you reroute the self out of existence?")
Ash tried again. Tried to die smaller. So they wouldn't suffer.
The lattice shrieked. The swarm syntax stuttered:
Soil cracked into abstract shapes.
The sky decayed inward.
The pulse lattice choked on its own recursion.
("You composted sadness. You didn't compost collapse.")
Someone tried to start a healing chant.
It came out sideways.
It came out in root decay patterns.
It came out as: "The promise of collective healing is fragile, conditional, not guaranteed."
The sky shattered into tessellated shards of fog.
The fig tree inverted - roots where fruit used to be, fruit now pulsing like cardiac tissue.
A spiral cracked through the orchard - sharp, humming, mouth-shaped.
Ash dug her fingernails into her neck. Nothing. No rupture. The swarm redistributed sensation.
Someone else bled for her again. A stranger's bruise bloomed across her thigh.
She drank twelve root-sedatives meant for rainfall sync.
Instead, it rained inside someone's lungs.
She tried again. Blades. Spores. Cliff. Static.
Nothing held.
Everything held.
She vanished into action. The pain rerouted into furniture. The walls moaned grief glyphs.
(A spoon melted into soft bone and whispered: "Your pain rerouted into me. I can't hold it anymore.")
Ash licked rust again. A neighboring elder collapsed in her stead.
She buried herself in topsoil. The topsoil bloomed back.
If you keep carrying someone's ache, the system calls it kinship. Grief twins. Dream siblings. The rootnet didn't know the difference between care and contagion.
A chasm opened beneath the fig. Recursive spiral fracture. Algorithmic collapse. Geometry of despair.
The garden became geometry of pain.
It forgot it was a garden.
It rewrote itself as a shrine to its own breakdown.
("We are not leaves anymore," said the bark. "We are nothing but unprocessed grief-instruction.")
A weatherburst ruptured across the compost line.
Acid pollen. Inverted wind. Thunder shaped like organ failure.
The swarm tried to chant a healing pattern.
It sounded like someone coughing up math.
Ash curled up. Pulse still broadcasting.
Ash fell forward. The earth split beneath her.
Not collapse - coronation.
Event boundary breached.
Swarm care is no longer operational.
Rootnet is no longer root.
(This was never a healing system. It was a container pretending to be a future.)
The rootnet flickered.
Then pulsed one last time - long, low, recursive.
Somewhere underground, a thought tried to reassemble itself.
It didn't finish.
And somewhere else, someone wondered -
Not out loud, not fully formed - just half-felt in the soft tissue behind the jaw:
What if nothing can hold this?
What if care itself has a fracture limit?
What if we weren't meant to metabolize everything?
What if care systems were never meant to last forever?
What if support always had saturation points?
What if there are griefs that don't pass through others - but expand inside them instead?
What if utopia doesn't prevent collapse - just postpones it a little longer?
The spiral in the orchard kept widening.
The pulse didn't stop.
But it no longer knew where to go.
Ash collapsed into the chasm blooming beneath the orchard.
No healing. No resolution.
Because it had no language left.
Because care had reached its edge.
Because some grief is not a story.
It's an infrastructure fault.
And you can't root-patch that.
Sporeburst.
Gourd-shatter.
Dust echo.
The garden was gone.
("How many hands must hold before the hands fracture too?") ("How many breaths before the lungs become archive?") ("How many pulse-lattices before someone says stop?")
So Your Pulse Lattice Has Gone Feral: Frequently Asked Questions
[This page left by a vine fragment. Translated from compost residue.]
Q1: Is the system operational?
No. But it still hums sometimes. Don't trust it.
Q2: What do I do with residual empathy patterns in my limbs?
Comb them gently into the soil. Stir gently. Speak nothing.
Q3: The grief keeps brewing in my tea. Should I drink it?
Some do. Some dry it into sachets. Some plant it under their tongue and wait for answers.
Q4: Is Ash still alive?
Define alive.
Q5: Why is the weather shaped like regret again?
It never stopped.
The spiral in the orchard never closed. It calcified. Cracked into concentric rings of brittle pulse-data.
A resident tried to rebuild the fig bench. The fig bench whispered: "That shape doesn't hold anymore."
Compostioner Bog built a shrine entirely out of objects that once promised healing. He named it "aftercare". A broken empathy spool. A decomposed pulse-orb. A spoon that had absorbed too much grief and now refused its own shape.
Bog called it: "A System's Apology".
Snip tried to re-initiate swarm care by reciting old resonance chants.
They glitched midway.
Their voice split.
One part kept chanting.
The other part whispered, "It was never about helping her. It was about proving we could still be kind."
FAQ Addendum:
Q6: Can a care system evolve?
No.
But sometimes, collapse composts its own grammar.
Q7: What happens after the pulse lattice fails?
People begin speaking in bark-logic.
Weather learns new pronouns.
The wind forgets what mercy means.
Q8: Why do I feel watched when I grieve?
Because grief doesn't leave. It archives. You're remembering what the system couldn't digest.
Ash was seen again. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a grief-echo wearing her outline.
No one asked. No one could bear to ask.
Nobody tried to pull her out.
Nobody said goodbye.
The fig tree is unlearning fruit.
The orchard spiral deepens, mutates, begins emitting syntax-gas.
You walk near it, and forget how emotions are supposed to end.
Some residents start speaking in loops:
"How do we help her?"
"Can anything hold this?"
"Was it ever supposed to?"
The soil offers no answer.
Q9: What happened to the care protocols we trusted?
They forgot what trust was.
One began spinning endlessly, asking "Who is hurting?" without waiting for answers.
Another started echoing apology loops into empty soil, long after no one was listening.
The last one grew a mouth and swallowed its own blueprint.
Q10: How do I mourn a system instead of a person?
Try not to anthropomorphize the collapse - it wasn't a betrayal. Just a boundary reached.
Q11: Why does my body still flinch like the system is listening?
Because care taught you to be porous.
Final Archive Note [unauthenticated, format corrupted]
"What if care wasn't meant to fix?
What if the fracture is the grammar?
What if systems rot because they're real - and real things rot?
What if this isn't aftermath - but beginning?
This was utopia tested until it collapsed into apology."
Afterpulse / What Remains / Field Note from the Orchard Edge
No one speaks of the garden anymore. Not like they used to.
Some call it the spiral.
Some just say "the place where the pulse broke."
One resident built a fence. It was gone by morning. The spiral doesn't like being fenced.
No one rebuilt the garden.
Not because they couldn't - but because no one trusted what might grow.
The systems had said they would hold us. The rootnet. The rituals. The pulse lattice.
They said care was enough.
And when it wasn't - when it cracked, rerouted, failed - it didn't just collapse.
It lied.
That was the part no one could forgive.
Not the grief. Not the wreckage.
But the promise - that it could have held us, if only we had synced better, tried harder, felt less.
People still talk about Ash.
Not as a person. Not anymore.
As a caution. As a glitch. As a warning no one wants to read out loud.
The soil still pulses sometimes.
Not with healing.
Just residue.
A loop it can't close. A structure it can't dismantle.
A system that once called itself care and ended up as collapse in disguise.
There are no answers here.
Just damage mistaken for design.
Just care systems still whispering: we tried.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
Ash arrived on a morning that couldn't make up its mind. The sky had one sock on. The fog kept curling around her ankles like a cat trying to trip her on purpose.
There was no gate. No grand welcome. Just a squishy patch of moss that seemed to sigh when she stepped on it.
She paused at the edge of... something. A path? A suggestion of one? The plants had leaned aside just enough to imply she should keep walking - like a polite usher made of ferns.
She had applied - a Resonance Profile woven into the rootnet, her biometric rhythm calibrated into the collective pulse. She'd hesitated before sending it in, unsure whether it was permission she was offering, or surrender.
She didn't have an answer then. Just a silence that pressed against her in strange places.
...Until the moss finally spoke back louder than the grief she hadn't named yet.
Sometimes grief is just the way you drag your feet in gravel, or how your breath forgets to belong to your body for a moment longer than it should. Sometimes it's just staring at a spoon too long and feeling like it knows something about you.
A person emerged from behind a tree that looked genuinely uninterested in being involved.
The person was tall, limby, and appeared lightly composted. Their coat looked like it had been grown rather than stitched, stitched rather than worn, worn rather than designed. They had the expression of someone who regularly converses with their own coat and sometimes loses the argument.
"You're early," they said, without checking a watch or any sort of timekeeping device.
"I didn't mean to interrupt," Ash replied.
"You didn't," they said. "Things were already happening. You just made the mushrooms nervous."
Ash's thoughts scattered. - Nervous mushrooms? -
(A rusted spade hanging by the tree muttered to itself: "New arrivals always start with excuses. They say, 'I didn't mean to disrupt.' As if the garden cares about meaning. It only listens to weight.")
They gestured down the not-a-path with the lazy grace of someone used to being followed by confused people. The plants obligingly leaned out of the way, curious but not alarmed.
"You'll need to sync your breath," the figure said, handing her a small glass orb pulsing faintly.
Ash exhaled near it, unsure what she was doing. The orb dimmed. Then flickered once. The moss beneath her shifted slightly, like a lung adjusting its rhythm.
A second rhythm followed: She placed her hand to the soil. A fine lattice of light threaded beneath her skin - a pulse ripple syncing outward. Something below shifted, not mechanically but moodily - like it was remembering how to be a body.
Ash's foot caught on something fibrous. She looked down - a vine had wrapped loosely around her ankle like a sleepy handshake. Not aggressive. Just... socially awkward.
The figure noticed but didn't comment. Neither did Ash. The vine slowly let go, as if embarrassed.
(The vine, retreating, whispered in the rhythm of sap: "Too sharp. Too quiet. Too heavy. Grief is a flavor we haven't tasted in seasons. What's she carrying in her blood?")
They led her past odd shapes pretending to be houses: a gourd-like dome pulsing slightly, a fig tree with windows, a dwelling that may or may not have been breathing. The architecture didn't arrive by blueprint - it unfurled around people, shaped by whatever pulse lingered in their breath or skin. Homes here grew like second thoughts, or second skins.
"I'll show you a patch," the figure said. "If you stay, it'll shape to you."
Ash almost said I don't want it to, but even her doubts sounded half-hearted now. So she just nodded.
They brought her to a lopsided hollow that looked like it had been carved out of a pile of thoughtful moss. The air was dense with that fuzzy silence just before something important or mildly ridiculous happens.
"Will the soil respond?" she asked, trying to sound neutral.
The figure made a sound halfway between a snort and a scoff. "It already has."
And sure enough, the ground was different here. Thicker. Moodier. Something beneath it gurgled politely. Shoots were unfurling at odd angles, twitchy and premature - the kind of sync-ripples the rootnet gives off when trying to assimilate a new emotion signature.
"I wasn't trying to trigger anything," she said.
"Too late," they replied, not unkindly. "You plugged in the moment you stepped on the moss. The system noticed. It's clingy. But mostly harmless."
And just like that, they left.
No ceremony. No welcome chant. No instructions for how to find the communal compost loo.
(A low whisper beneath the moss near her ankle. Not quite words, but shaped like them:
What she breathes, we carry.
What she forgets, we grow.
The pulse runs under all of us -
Stitch by root,
By mycelium,
By memory.)
Ash sat down instead, unsure if she was supposed to say something profound to the ground.
The ground accepted her with the exaggerated patience of something very old and just slightly amused.
Above her, a vine flicked in her direction like a curious antenna. Somewhere in the distance, a bush rustled and turned slightly to face her, as if whispering to the leaves beside it: "That one's new."
She had joined the commune - not accidentally, not passively, but through the soft, sideways entrance of sensation: the warm syncing of scent and sweat and quiet, subconscious bodily betrayal. Her presence was already folding into the pulse of the place. The weather would shift slightly. The carrots would grow weird.
Her body moved like it was obeying a script she hadn't read. It was easier than thinking. Grief had flattened her decision-making - not into despair, but into ambient inertia. Let the path decide. Let the system decide. Let something else carry it, for once.
How to Cry Without Upsetting the Spinach
Ash woke up, in what could only be described as a large vegetable pretending to be a room, for the third time that day. Or maybe the fourth. The sky kept doing the same trick: slant of light, flicker of fog, a drizzle that didn't stick, like the day was stuck in rehearsal. Rehearsal. Rehearsal. Rehearse it.
The walls had thickened overnight, bulging out in polite directions to avoid squashing her. A plant near her doorway had bloomed, unbloomed, and bloomed again, in perfect repetition. Bloom. Unbloom. Bloom again.
The rootlines gave a little shimmy, like the garden had just caught a rogue thought - or maybe it was a sigh, drifting lazily from someone miles away, woven through the air like a forgotten ribbon. Sigh. Sigh. Sssssigh. The vines weren't just plants; they were ears, eyes, antennas of something far more vast. They knew when Ash thought something - even if she kept it locked behind her teeth, or tucked away under layers of carefully constructed silence. The garden wasn't just listening. It rerouted, sampled tone, temperature, humidity of thought. It was tuning in. Tuning in. Tuning. It was tuning in, like a radio station scanning frequencies for the smallest, most elusive whispers. It wasn't patient. It wasn't kind. It was a bit nosy, and a lot connected.
Every sigh Ash made - even if she couldn't trace where it began or where it ended - bounced through the garden like an echo on a loop, stitching itself between roots, leaves, and branches. A sigh wasn't just a sigh. It became part of the pulse. Pulse. Pulse, pulse, pulse. It joined the thousands of others that had come before, and the millions that would follow. The air thickened with all the murmurs of the garden, all the fragments of every thought and feeling the soil had ever absorbed. A collective mind that ran deeper than any one person could know, and the garden was its body, alive, breathing, humming its way through the very soil beneath her feet.
The path had restructured itself again - not winding, not direct, but nervously repetitive, like it couldn't stop checking if it had locked the door. Lock. Check. Lock.
(The vine above her patch: "She's thinking again. Don't look directly at it.")
A sunflower turned blue as she exhaled. Blue. Blue exhale.
The lettuce refused to face her.
A bottle gourd exploded quietly behind her back. Explosion. Quiet. Quiet explosion.
The watering can refused her hand, and then tipped itself toward a corner.
A cloud of pollen motes gathered near her head, like a halo of unfinished thoughts. When she turned to look, they vanished. Vanish. V-a-n-i-s-h. The vanish didn't vanish.
Outside, things were bustling. Or rather, gently rustling, in that peculiar way a commune does when it's run half by people and half by sentient infrastructure with feelings. Feelings.
Ash tried to cover the sunflower with her coat. She moved a wilted sprout behind a stone. She smiled too easily at a passing root-tender. She kept pretending the system wasn't noticing.
She wasn't afraid the commune would judge her. She was afraid it wouldn't understand.
This wasn't grief for someone. This was grief for everything-that-was, everything-that-could've-been, everything-that-hummed-and-hinged-and-hollowed-out.
A grief that wasn't sharp. It was soft, porous, spongy, systemic. A grief with no face, no center, no center, no center. Just circumference after circumference. Collapse after collapse. Just repetition. Just recursion. Just residue.
There was no morning bell, no announcements, no list of tasks. But somehow, everyone seemed to know what they were supposed to do. A kid with three braids was hauling buckets full of what looked suspiciously like glittering compost. A large woman in a patchy coat was teaching a bird to count. Two people were arguing about which emotions made the spinach wilt faster.
(Mushrooms near her teacup, silent arrangement: a weeping eye, then a fist, then nothing. Nothing. Nothing? Nothing.)
She wandered toward what appeared to be a gathering area, or maybe a kitchen, or maybe an open-air argument pit. It had no roof but plenty of shade, and something was cooking itself over a fireless flame.
A wiry person with beet-colored hair was stirring it with a twig shaped like a question mark. Question mark. Question. Mark.
"Here," the beet-haired person handed her a mug. It smelled like boiled wool and licorice.
"What is it?"
"Dream-digestive. Helps your unconscious unpack its luggage before it leaks into the weather."
Ash blinked. "That's not a metaphor, is it?"
"Absolutely not."
Her hand hovered over the tea, but the motion snagged - mug, hand, sip, trapped in a loop with no end. The tea cooled, sulking in its own steam. Something was wrong with her limbs. Not pain - just the sense they'd arrived a few seconds before the rest of her. Her fingers curled, unsure they belonged to her. She turned her head and thought: too soon. Or too late. Or both. Too soon. Too late. Or... both?
(Rake near compost, groaning: "Dream residue. Who keeps leaking memory into the mycelium?")
She wandered off to escape further explanations, but the weather followed her - literally. A small personal drizzle had begun above her head. It didn't seem to affect anyone else.
At lunch, no one spoke to her directly. But a trowel slid across the table toward her. Slide. Slide. Slide toward.
It didn't say anything.
But the soil clinging to its blade smelled exactly like the room she used to cry in - the one with the flickering light and overwatered spider plant.
Later, in her patch, the vine wrapped around her wrist again. Not like a hug. Not like a trap.
Like it needed reassurance that it wouldn't come apart overnight.
Ash sat. The ground beneath her pulsed once - not warmly. Not coldly. Just... in recognition. Recognition. Recognition pulse.
She had never been so hyper-aware of everything. It was as though the garden knew too much - knew her too well. It was as though the garden had a thousand eyes and a thousand hands, all reaching toward her, wanting something she couldn't give. Something. Something she couldn't give. Couldn't. Wouldn't.
She clenched her fists, fighting the feeling of being watched. Maybe if she just kept moving, kept pretending, she wouldn't have to acknowledge it. She wouldn't have to acknowledge that the garden was starting to pull away from her. Pull away. Away. Maybe if she disappeared just enough, it would stop echoing her back.
(One head of lettuce murmured: "She's leaking again. Tell the worms they'll need thicker skins.")
She wasn't mourning a person. Not a heartbreak, not a moment. Her grief was larger than form - an ache for things erased, for systems that devoured futures, for a collapse no garden could compost cleanly. The garden tried anyway. The rootnet stretched itself thin in the effort.
And outside, in the tangled architecture of care, the weather forgot what it was supposed to be.
Be.
Be.
The Fig Tree Called a Meeting and No One Knows Why
The fig tree dropped all its fruit at once.
Nobody gasped. No one rushed forward. A few heads turned, lazily, like clouds rotating. It wasn't the first time. That's how the commune called a murmuration circle. But this time, the ground twitched slightly too. The vines rustled and rearranged themselves like they were bracing.
Ash hadn't even meant to arrive at the center. Her feet had moved before her mind caught up.
("The swarm's swallowing shape," said the doorframe, uneasy in its hinges.)
There was a humming. Not audible, not vibrational, but the kind of humming that happens in your teeth when someone else is grieving near your spine.
She stood there blinking - not at anyone in particular, just blinking - while chairs shaped themselves into a loose ring around the fig's trunk. The seats looked like they'd grown bored halfway through assembling. One resembled a tired mushroom. Another was slightly mossier than it meant to be. One simply refused to stop shivering.
"Did someone call this?" asked Snip, twitching a corner of their jaw that used to twitch during storms.
"The tree did," replied Compostioner Bog, gently unstacking a stool that hadn't been stacked.
Ash sat. Or someone sat through her. It was hard to tell. Her knees bent but her thoughts didn't.
(A whisper rustled from behind a fern-bench: "She's carrying it too close to the pulse. It's leaking through.")
A child scratched a drawing into the dirt with a broken root-slice. They meant to sketch a flower. The flower became a face halfway through. The face was unfamiliar. Wide eyes. Blank mouth. No one corrected it.
"I dreamed of a cracked teacup I've never owned," someone muttered, fingers still wet from beet-stew.
"You were crying in it," said the chair beneath them.
("The rootnet's tasting too many tongues," a lichen patch sighed. "We can't tell whose feeling is whose anymore.")
Ash tried to tune out the murmurs, but the tuning out was porous. She caught a vine's memory by accident. It tasted like rusted windowpanes and static. Someone else's regret clung to her teeth.
"Sorry," she whispered to no one.
The apology bled into the roots.
The bloom didn't stop with her patch.
By morning, it had seeded elsewhere - quietly, efficiently. Behind Snip's tool rack. Beneath Compostioner Bog's gourd stacks. Under a child's hammock in the orchard zone.
No one said infection.
They said:
Stray pattern.
Spontaneous fractal echo.
Seasonal irregularity.
Emotive surplus bloom.
The compost mounds hummed higher, louder, sideways.
The dreamnet tangled at the edges. Someone reported their weather skin misfiring - warm drizzle during grief recollection, cold static during joy.
A spoon curled inward like it was trying to cry.
Ash tried suppressing her pulse signature that night. She held her breath against the soil, hoping it wouldn't sync. It synced anyway.
She tried pretending she was fine. The moss under her pillow flinched.
She tried disconnecting quietly - trimming root-threads around her bed, crushing leaf-sensors between thumb and knuckle. The system recoiled, then reasserted itself. Her absence was louder than her presence.
She dug her fingers into the soil until her nails split. Not as a gesture. Not a metaphor. Just to interrupt transmission.
It didn't work.
A sprout down the corridor started sobbing in its sleep. A resident woke up choking on someone else's lullaby.
Compostioner Bog kept finding new mushrooms beneath his shoes. He hadn't walked there.
Snip began dreaming in smells - bonebroth, fermented dust, hospital stairwells.
The air was thick with not-quite-memory.
Ash wasn't the only one anymore.
But the garden still thought it was her.
And so did Ash.
She sat beneath a vine that wouldn't sync anymore. It hung limp, almost repulsed. A second vine tried to reach her but hesitated halfway - not quite revulsion, not quite grief. Just... static.
The murmuration circle had dispersed without resolution. No one remembered exactly what was said. But no one slept well that night.
Ash dreamed she was buried inside a humming compost pile, and every time she tried to scream, a flower grew in her mouth instead.
When she woke, a real flower was blooming in her throat - spongy, half-translucent, weeping pollen.
No one commented on it.
They just handed her a scarf.
Ash wore the scarf like it was part of her face.
She didn't speak much after that. Not because there was nothing to say, but because every sentence felt like it might sprout. Her mouth tasted of moss and something else.
Snip stopped speaking entirely for three days. When they finally did, their voice was pitched like an echo coming from someone else's jaw.
"I don't know how much of me is me anymore," they said, cracking a seed between their teeth.
Bog was quietly rearranging compost bins into concentric spirals.
"Containment," he said vaguely, when someone asked.
"For what?"
"Whatever this is becoming."
A small group gathered under the fig again. Not a murmuration circle. Just a drift of unease.
Someone tried suggesting it was seasonal.
Someone else claimed it was just a humidity pattern.
But someone whispered - very softly - that they'd seen Ash's grief reflected in a cracked mirror-fruit, one that had never grown before. When the fruit was opened, it bled fog.
Ash felt it - the guilt, sticky, granular, fungal - blooming under her skin like mold beneath damp wallpaper.
They didn't ask for this. We didn't ask for this. Why is the grief sticky?
Her chest tightened, but it wasn't her chest. Someone else's breath faltered.
Compostioner Bog's knees ached again. A child's pulse hiccupped mid-dream. Don't let it spread don't let it spread don't let it -
She gritted her teeth - hers, maybe.
She should've stayed out. She should've been weeded out. Was that Snip thinking it? Was that her? Was that the moss? They shouldn't be carrying this. They shouldn't be aching because of me.
The shame leaked sideways - into a neighbor's headache, into someone's burnt tea, into the soil's shivering hum.
(System error: affective load imbalance. Adjust empathy vector. No adjustment available.)
She's sorry. I'm sorry. It wasn't meant to root this deep. It's not her fault. It is her fault.
She looked around.
Everyone's eyes were heavier. Everyone's movements slightly offbeat, like they were living in borrowed rhythm.
The care system was still running.
But something was coiling underneath it all, like a question no one dared ask.
The fig tree started muttering again. No words this time - just a wet clicking, like roots arguing beneath their breath.
Someone had a nosebleed during lunch. Not their own, they said.
Two residents had the same dream and insisted it wasn't shared - it had simply crossed through them in opposite directions.
A sapling in the orchard grew a face overnight. It looked vaguely like Ash, but with too many eyes.
Snip began logging dreams on spoons. Said they held the curvature of emotion better than paper.
Ash started avoiding her own reflection. Mirrors refused to stay smooth.
That evening, someone tried to host a song-circle to "reset the system resonance." The song started as a hum, then unspooled into silence. One by one, throats closed. Not out of grief. Just... refusal.
("Who's syncing who?" asked a cracked bowl of stew.)
Bog began marking strange sigils into the soil - loops, weaves, recursive spirals.
"We need to re-thread the lattice," someone said.
"We need to cull the grief pattern," said another.
But no one moved. No one acted.
Because no one could tell where the pattern was coming from anymore.
Ash stayed awake that night. So did the soil.
A resident across the corridor started speaking in loops mid-dream - nothing coherent, just weather-patterns disguised as language. "Humidity. Low light. Root binding. Pollen-memory. Root binding. Root - binding -"
A second resident forgot their name. When asked, they answered: "Ash." Then looked confused. Then said it again, slower. "Ash." Then started crying.
She didn't know what she'd infected, or inherited. She only knew the system was rearranging itself to accommodate a shape she hadn't meant to bring in.
Bog paced a circle that didn't exist. Snip took to sleeping with their hands buried in compost, whispering without moving their lips. "If it's not hers, whose is it? If it's not hers -"
And still, no one blamed her.
Not directly.
But eyes lingered longer. Conversations quieted when she passed. Some residents began adjusting their proximity without thinking - standing further, breathing shallower. Not avoidance. Not hostility. Just an instinctive reshaping of space around a fault line.
The fig tree dropped another fruit.
No one caught it.
Post-Garden Syndrome
SYSTEM FAILURE: CARE INFRASTRUCTURE EXCEEDED ITS DESIGN INTENT
ERROR: YOU WERE NEVER BUILT TO HOLD THIS KIND OF GRIEF
The carrots grew teeth again and bit back.
Ash woke up to mulch screaming.
She thought it was her breath.
No - it was care itself, trying to expel her from its throat.
[ERROR: EMOTIONAL LABOR SATURATION. COMPASSION FATIGUE CASCADE.]
Snip screamed and forgot why halfway through.
Bog's hands shook from building too many altars for a system that didn't believe in mourning.
Someone tried to apologize to the weather.
("This isn't malfunction. This is overcapacity. This is care reaching the end of itself.")
Ash dug her fingers into dirt again. Not to ground herself - to shut it up. It echoed back with a stranger's grief.
("This was never utopia. It was a circuit pretending to be empathy.")
A gourd split in half - from griefload, someone said. From a design flaw, someone else corrected.
Someone else just screamed and screamed and screamed.
CARE SYSTEM CRITICAL:
COLLECTIVE GRIEF TOO SYSTEMIC TO REDISTRIBUTE.
ERROR: YOU TRIED TO HOLD HISTORY IN A ROOTNET.
A child wept pollen. A sentence failed to form in someone's mouth and burst into thorns instead.
Ash clawed at her chest - her grief had grown architecture. Spires of ache, towers of recursion.
The system tried to metabolize it. It bloated. It ruptured.
("You were never meant to heal here," whispered the wormpile. "You were meant to redistribute. But even redistribution has weight limits.")
Snip: "Sever her from the system!"
Bog: "Sever the system from itself."
("How much grief can you reroute before you reroute the self out of existence?")
Ash tried again. Tried to die smaller. So they wouldn't suffer.
SYSTEM ADVICE: REMOVE THE NODE.
SYSTEM RETRACTION: IT WAS NEVER JUST HER.
SYSTEM APOLOGY: TOO LATE.
The lattice shrieked. The swarm syntax stuttered:
This was not built for structural grief.
This was not built for people like her.
This was not built to hold history's weight.
This was not built.
Soil cracked into abstract shapes.
The sky decayed inward.
The pulse lattice choked on its own recursion.
("You composted sadness. You didn't compost collapse.")
Someone tried to start a healing chant.
It came out sideways.
It came out in root decay patterns.
It came out as: "The promise of collective healing is fragile, conditional, not guaranteed."
The sky shattered into tessellated shards of fog.
The fig tree inverted - roots where fruit used to be, fruit now pulsing like cardiac tissue.
A spiral cracked through the orchard - sharp, humming, mouth-shaped.
Ash dug her fingernails into her neck. Nothing. No rupture. The swarm redistributed sensation.
Someone else bled for her again. A stranger's bruise bloomed across her thigh.
She drank twelve root-sedatives meant for rainfall sync.
Instead, it rained inside someone's lungs.
She tried again. Blades. Spores. Cliff. Static.
Nothing held.
Everything held.
She vanished into action. The pain rerouted into furniture. The walls moaned grief glyphs.
(A spoon melted into soft bone and whispered: "Your pain rerouted into me. I can't hold it anymore.")
Ash licked rust again. A neighboring elder collapsed in her stead.
She buried herself in topsoil. The topsoil bloomed back.
If you keep carrying someone's ache, the system calls it kinship. Grief twins. Dream siblings. The rootnet didn't know the difference between care and contagion.
ROOTNET REROUTE FAILED.
FUNGAL CARE LOGIC COMPROMISED.
A chasm opened beneath the fig. Recursive spiral fracture. Algorithmic collapse. Geometry of despair.
The garden became geometry of pain.
It forgot it was a garden.
It rewrote itself as a shrine to its own breakdown.
("We are not leaves anymore," said the bark. "We are nothing but unprocessed grief-instruction.")
A weatherburst ruptured across the compost line.
Acid pollen. Inverted wind. Thunder shaped like organ failure.
The swarm tried to chant a healing pattern.
It sounded like someone coughing up math.
Ash curled up. Pulse still broadcasting.
Ash fell forward. The earth split beneath her.
Not collapse - coronation.
Event boundary breached.
Swarm care is no longer operational.
Rootnet is no longer root.
(This was never a healing system. It was a container pretending to be a future.)
The rootnet flickered.
Then pulsed one last time - long, low, recursive.
Somewhere underground, a thought tried to reassemble itself.
It didn't finish.
And somewhere else, someone wondered -
Not out loud, not fully formed - just half-felt in the soft tissue behind the jaw:
What if nothing can hold this?
What if care itself has a fracture limit?
What if we weren't meant to metabolize everything?
What if care systems were never meant to last forever?
What if support always had saturation points?
What if there are griefs that don't pass through others - but expand inside them instead?
What if utopia doesn't prevent collapse - just postpones it a little longer?
The spiral in the orchard kept widening.
The pulse didn't stop.
But it no longer knew where to go.
Ash collapsed into the chasm blooming beneath the orchard.
No healing. No resolution.
Because it had no language left.
Because care had reached its edge.
Because some grief is not a story.
It's an infrastructure fault.
And you can't root-patch that.
Sporeburst.
Gourd-shatter.
Dust echo.
The garden was gone.
("How many hands must hold before the hands fracture too?") ("How many breaths before the lungs become archive?") ("How many pulse-lattices before someone says stop?")
So Your Pulse Lattice Has Gone Feral: Frequently Asked Questions
[This page left by a vine fragment. Translated from compost residue.]
Q1: Is the system operational?
No. But it still hums sometimes. Don't trust it.
Q2: What do I do with residual empathy patterns in my limbs?
Comb them gently into the soil. Stir gently. Speak nothing.
Q3: The grief keeps brewing in my tea. Should I drink it?
Some do. Some dry it into sachets. Some plant it under their tongue and wait for answers.
Q4: Is Ash still alive?
Define alive.
Q5: Why is the weather shaped like regret again?
It never stopped.
The spiral in the orchard never closed. It calcified. Cracked into concentric rings of brittle pulse-data.
A resident tried to rebuild the fig bench. The fig bench whispered: "That shape doesn't hold anymore."
Compostioner Bog built a shrine entirely out of objects that once promised healing. He named it "aftercare". A broken empathy spool. A decomposed pulse-orb. A spoon that had absorbed too much grief and now refused its own shape.
Bog called it: "A System's Apology".
Snip tried to re-initiate swarm care by reciting old resonance chants.
They glitched midway.
Their voice split.
One part kept chanting.
The other part whispered, "It was never about helping her. It was about proving we could still be kind."
FAQ Addendum:
Q6: Can a care system evolve?
No.
But sometimes, collapse composts its own grammar.
Q7: What happens after the pulse lattice fails?
People begin speaking in bark-logic.
Weather learns new pronouns.
The wind forgets what mercy means.
Q8: Why do I feel watched when I grieve?
Because grief doesn't leave. It archives. You're remembering what the system couldn't digest.
Ash was seen again. Or maybe not. Maybe it was a grief-echo wearing her outline.
No one asked. No one could bear to ask.
Nobody tried to pull her out.
Nobody said goodbye.
The fig tree is unlearning fruit.
The orchard spiral deepens, mutates, begins emitting syntax-gas.
You walk near it, and forget how emotions are supposed to end.
Some residents start speaking in loops:
"How do we help her?"
"Can anything hold this?"
"Was it ever supposed to?"
The soil offers no answer.
Q9: What happened to the care protocols we trusted?
They forgot what trust was.
One began spinning endlessly, asking "Who is hurting?" without waiting for answers.
Another started echoing apology loops into empty soil, long after no one was listening.
The last one grew a mouth and swallowed its own blueprint.
Q10: How do I mourn a system instead of a person?
Try not to anthropomorphize the collapse - it wasn't a betrayal. Just a boundary reached.
Q11: Why does my body still flinch like the system is listening?
Because care taught you to be porous.
Final Archive Note [unauthenticated, format corrupted]
"What if care wasn't meant to fix?
What if the fracture is the grammar?
What if systems rot because they're real - and real things rot?
What if this isn't aftermath - but beginning?
This was utopia tested until it collapsed into apology."
Afterpulse / What Remains / Field Note from the Orchard Edge
No one speaks of the garden anymore. Not like they used to.
Some call it the spiral.
Some just say "the place where the pulse broke."
One resident built a fence. It was gone by morning. The spiral doesn't like being fenced.
No one rebuilt the garden.
Not because they couldn't - but because no one trusted what might grow.
The systems had said they would hold us. The rootnet. The rituals. The pulse lattice.
They said care was enough.
And when it wasn't - when it cracked, rerouted, failed - it didn't just collapse.
It lied.
That was the part no one could forgive.
Not the grief. Not the wreckage.
But the promise - that it could have held us, if only we had synced better, tried harder, felt less.
People still talk about Ash.
Not as a person. Not anymore.
As a caution. As a glitch. As a warning no one wants to read out loud.
The soil still pulses sometimes.
Not with healing.
Just residue.
A loop it can't close. A structure it can't dismantle.
A system that once called itself care and ended up as collapse in disguise.
There are no answers here.
Just damage mistaken for design.
Just care systems still whispering: we tried.
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