The deeper they ventured, the more artificial the forest began to feel.
It wasn't obvious at first. The trees still stretched skyward, their trunks wide and gnarled, their bark etched with intricate patterns. Flowers still bloomed in vivid clusters along the path. The air still trembled with insect hums and the occasional distant birdcall. But there was a rhythm beneath it all—a pulse, slow and unrelenting, like a breath the forest could no longer hide.
"Do you feel it?" Elysia asked as they entered a low valley blanketed in vines and a strange silken moss. "The cadence?"
Aouli paused. He closed his eyes and listened—not to the sounds, but to the pattern of them.
Yes. There it was. The insect chirps aligned every eight seconds. The wind gusted every sixteen. Even the rustling of the trees came at predictable intervals, as if the entire forest were timed by an invisible metronome.
"It's breathing," he said.
Elysia nodded. "Not metaphorically. Literally."
They stepped between two enormous root systems, and the air thickened with humidity and static charge. The flora grew denser here—overlapping layers of vines, translucent leaves, and spindly ferns that curled tightly at their approach. Aouli reached out to one, and it recoiled, then pulsed faintly beneath its fronds.
Then he saw the first of the structures.
Half-buried beneath centuries of growth, it resembled a ribcage forged from a mix of bone and ceramic. Tubes extended from its center, winding into the soil like veins. The structure trembled faintly—then released a slow, rattling breath of air from a vent near its base. A low chime followed.
"What is it?" Aouli asked, approaching with cautious reverence.
"A respiration engine," Elysia replied. "Part of the terraformers' third-generation life-support infrastructure. They installed these deep in the jungles to regulate carbon saturation, moisture retention, and microbial balance."
Aouli circled it, running his hand along the moss-covered exterior. Beneath the plant matter, he could feel the faint whir of dormant machinery struggling to keep pace. The vents coughed again, followed by a stuttering pulse. One of the tubes twitched, leaking a faint mist that smelled like synthetic pine and ozone.
"It's still functioning," he said.
"Barely," she answered. "And incorrectly. Its systems are two hundred years out of calibration. What it's maintaining now may be more harm than help."
Aouli looked out over the valley. Dozens more of the structures were embedded into the terrain—some completely overgrown, others cracked open like eggshells. From this distance, they reminded him of grave markers. Or ribs.
"How did they not foresee this?" he asked. "They made the forest. They integrated the systems."
"They assumed stability," Elysia said. "They designed for control. They forgot that even engineered life—especially engineered life—evolves. It adapts."
She motioned for him to follow her toward the heart of the valley.
As they walked, Aouli began to notice stranger things.
Leaves patterned like circuit boards. Trees with bark that flexed as if breathing. Fungi that pulsed in time with the earth's tremor, some of them releasing sparks of low-light energy from their caps. A squirrel-like creature darted across a branch, its fur interspersed with metallic quills. It paused to look at him—and its eyes were perfect circles of flickering light.
"This isn't nature," he murmured.
"No," Elysia said. "It's not. It's a hybrid. A testbed. The original terraformers believed harmony between life and machine would create resilience. Instead, they created dependency—and chaos."
They arrived at a clearing. At its center stood a tower.
It rose perhaps ten meters high and looked like a tree at first, its surface barklike and uneven. But closer inspection revealed it was composed of interlocking panels, some transparent, others studded with ports and connectors. Vines wrapped around it, but didn't conceal it. They were part of it.
"Core regulator," Elysia said. "The brainstem of this region."
Aouli stepped forward, hesitant. As he neared, a panel slid open with a whisper, revealing a screen embedded in the trunk. Lines of code scrolled by, interspersed with bursts of bioluminescent data in a language he didn't understand.
But the meaning was clear.
Instability threshold reached. Adaptive override active. Neural sync failing.
He reached out—and the screen pulsed, reacting to his energy.
A sudden flood of images slammed into his mind.
Fields of golden crops thriving under artificial sunlight. Engineers in white suits cheering as the first oxygen trees sprouted. Vast greenhouses, laboratories brimming with new life. And then—failure. A sequence of errors. Algorithms fragmenting. A massive bloom season wiped out by microbial overcorrection. Children coughing in sealed domes. Vines growing through electrical conduits. And finally… abandonment.
They had left.
Left the planet, the project, the forest—to its own confused devices.
Aouli staggered back, stunned. The screen dimmed.
He turned to Elysia, fury bubbling beneath his grief.
"They abandoned it?"
"They tried to fix it," she said. "For decades. But they feared losing control more than they feared collapse. And when they lost both… they ran."
Aouli clenched his fists, his glow darkening slightly.
"It didn't have to be like this. They made this world."
"And then expected it to behave like a machine," Elysia replied. "But it became a being."
A low rumble echoed across the valley. One of the respiration engines shuddered, released a burst of steam, and collapsed inward, its structure folding like paper. Birds scattered. The ground beneath it groaned.
Aouli stared.
The forest exhaled again.