TheArk://block0c.capsule0000.artefactⱶ7řƻ6vě1ɓ4ɯ9.omn/
Wavefunction Search Vectors: Natural World
OMNI Title:

The Tree

I bought the tree because I didn’t know what else to give him. He didn’t need or want things and booze made him sleepy. There’s only so much chocolate that one man can eat, alone. I chose the tree for the silver-green calmness of its leaves and the way its mottled bark peeled away from the white trunk, like revealing secrets. It looked to me like all the colors of the world had been compressed under the weight of time into this one slender giant. I transferred the file, and the map - of the tree’s physical coordinates. And then I called him, the next day. You should come and see it, he said. His voice made me hopeful.

And so I went and saw in the middle of the white room where he passed his days (getting better at scrabble, so he told me once, proudly) - there the tree stood. It seemed to grow from the grey carpet, with thin and knobbly roots poking up for air and its droopy canopy kissing the ceiling. Is it really mine? he asked in a whisper. Yes - I said. As much as it is anyone’s. Yours to look at. Yours to protect.

Each week when I went to visit, he’d show me something new. A spider was spinning her web between sheets of bark. A cluster of leaves had fallen, most of them within our scan-zone and some just outside, so that we could see their tips disintegrating from the view that we paid for, and appearing potentially in a plot owned by someone else, watched over by other eyes.

I didn’t hear about the fire until it was already over. A routine back-burn, in a place where fire could still mean new life. I was waiting for a train when I heard the message from the nurses. They’d found him, shivering in his room, the carpet drenched. He was throwing cupfulls of water at nothing, just a patch of thin air, and saying over and over that he couldn’t bear to watch it burn.