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Posted by Nancy Lambert

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

If a Digitized Tree Falls

As humanity moves to the stars, a young woman attempts to preserve the magical forest she fell in love with as a child.

Illustrated by Franco Zacha

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Ken Liu, Caroline M. Yoachim

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Published on September 10, 2025

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As humanity moves to the stars, a young woman attempts to preserve the magical forest she fell in love with as a child.

Novelette | 8,000 words

Greg folded dirty clothes, carefully sliding the neat stacks into a vacuum-seal bag to be compressed. Both his daughters had over-packed so much for the trip that their laundry wouldn’t fit back in the suitcase any other way, and instead of packing they’d gone off with their mother for one last walk in what Tara called the Magic Forest. It was the perfect name for this beautiful place, much better than “Disputed Woodland Zone 581,” an awkward official designation that had been the only acceptable compromise between three different countries speaking six different languages, once they’d finally agreed to stop building bunkers and open the area up for research and tourism.

He could hardly blame the girls for escaping to the forest. Tall, thick trunks seemed to reach all the way to heaven, like pillars in a magnificent cathedral, each topped with a dense crown of leaves that rustled and whispered, the irregular green clouds quilting a canopy full of sunlit gaps and seams that shifted and writhed as the trees swayed gently, a mesmerizing, abstract Sistine Chapel painted by lightning in slow motion. Thick vines draped down from high boughs like silk tapestries, decorated with orchids of every description that were twins of the colorful birds sitting in the branches. Hummingbirds darted about, untroubled by the humans scrambling to get out their phones, hovering, backing up, twisting in midair—Tara said they moved like fairies, and Navi had, for once, not contradicted her big sister on principle but solemnly agreed. They were at such lovely ages, eight and six, when all the world was wondrous and full of possibility.

But how much of this idyllic world will still exist when they’re my age?

His art—rendered in incredible detail for a dynamic visualization module that held an entire ecosystem—seemed more relevant than ever, not just an observation about the world, but a testimony. A digital twin of the Magic Forest encapsulated in what looked like nothing more than a snow globe. He was grateful that he’d had the opportunity to come here to make some final sketches and calibrations, with Mia of course since she was a biologist on the project, but also to share this experience with their daughters.

Mia ducked her head into their tent. “Where are the girls? The charter bus is here to take everyone back down the mountain to the airport.”

“I thought they were with you. They told me you wanted to take one more hike in the Magic Forest.”

“I was out buying souvenirs,” Mia held up a canvas shopping bag with the tour company logo. “I thought they were helping you finish packing.”

Greg shut the suitcase lid. “I last saw them fifteen minutes ago. They can’t have gotten far.”

His initial confidence soon proved misplaced. They split up and searched the campsite, asking everyone if they’d seen the girls, but no one had. Eventually they couldn’t hold the bus any longer, so it started down the winding mountain road, and still no sign of Tara and Navi. Most of the staff joined in the search, widening the radius and chattering on walkie-talkies.

In fairy tales, a Magic Forest could be dark and full of danger. Were the girls lost?

Greg and Mia searched at all the activity sites, all their wonders now tinged with worry: the observation deck where you would be winched hundreds of feet up on a rickety platform at four in the morning to catch sunrise above the mist-shrouded canopy (what if they fell?), the trunk of a tree whose side had been replaced with glass so that you could see a colony of ants churning like a living river inside (what if the ants felt threatened and sent out their soldiers?), the river crossing where you could dangle in vine-woven nets above thundering whitewater filled with leaping fish while eating lunch made from fruits and insects foraged from the surrounding forest (what if the girls tumbled in?), the trailhead that began a miles-long hike through the jungle for a glimpse of an elephant matriarch teaching her grandchildren how to fashion a backscratcher out of thorny branches (what if they couldn’t find their way back?) …

“I’m sure they’re fine,” Mia said, trying to reassure both herself and her husband. She turned to Greg, eyes suddenly wide with hope. “Wait, what about our project? Can we—”

“No predators are in the area; I checked the sensors, and anything big enough to be a potential threat to people would be tagged and tracked.” Greg shook his head in frustration. “But the sensor mesh is specifically modified to not track humans—both for privacy reasons and because each government is worried the others will use the network for spying. Besides—”

A tour guide ran up to them. “We found them.”

Back at camp, they learned that the girls had been hiding in the breakfast tent among the cooking supplies.

“We hoped that—” Tara sobbed so hard that she hiccupped. “—that you’d leave without us so we could live in the Magic Forest forever.”

Greg didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. For weeks leading up to the trip Tara had pleaded to spend the summer at home in hammocks, with bowls of Very Berry Lush Crush for every meal (“Ice cream is Navi’s and my culture! We’re supposed to experience local culture on vacations!”). And all through the interminable flight and winding bus ride to get here, Navi had kept up a litany of complaints about the anticipated horrors of strange foods and strange bugs and “strange air” and the injustice of being forced into another insufferable “educational experience.” Now they didn’t want to leave—despite the mosquito bites that were causing both girls to scratch like impatient monkeys.

“We’re super-duper sorry,” Tara said. As the older sister, it was her duty to make the verbal apology whenever the two got in trouble. Navi’s job was to get the tears welling in her big eyes. The combination was usually effective, though this time the girls still got a tag-team parental lecture.

Greg took a deep breath. In the end, things had turned out okay. The girls were safe, the flight was rebooked for late that evening, and one of the tour guides drove them down the winding mountain roads in the oversized van the company used for supply runs.

About twenty minutes into the drive, Tara asked, “Can we come back next year?”

Mia and Greg looked at each other, her expression pained, his resigned.

“We promise not to hide next time,” Navi said.

“We promise we’ll study all the emetic species,” said Tara. “I’ll make flash cards for both of us.”

“We’ll make it super educational,” Navi added.

“It’s ‘endemic,’” Mia said. Her fleeting smile disappeared as she glanced at Greg again. “But we can’t come back.”

“Because we got in trouble?” Tara asked.

“No, no! It’s nothing you did,” Greg said. “They’re closing it down.”

Mia and Greg explained as best they could how the three countries that together owned the forest were getting mad at each other, arguing over the money from the tourists. There was also increasing global and local tension, environmental concerns, and rising criticism of colonialism via tourism … none of which mattered to the girls, or probably even made sense. All they knew was that the Magic Forest was going to be closed forever and ever. They could never return.

Navi cried until she fell asleep, her seatbelt pulled taut so she could rest her head in Mia’s lap. Tara kept her face turned toward the window so that no one would see her tears.

Greg and Mia gazed at each other. She nodded.

He reached into his backpack and took out a cloth bundle, which he carefully unwrapped, handing the content to Tara.

“It’s like a snow globe, but better. Look.”

“It doesn’t have any snow.” Tara took the glass sphere and peered inside, dubious at first, but then her eyes went wide with wonder. There it was, the slowly swaying trees topped with their fluffy crowns, forming an undulating, breathing canopy of living puzzle pieces. The light inside the crystal sphere was reddish, hazy from a gathering mist. It was the Magic Forest, in miniature.

“Oh my gosh.”

“Here, you can adjust the view,” Greg said. He talked Tara through how to work the controls under the globe so that she could zoom in or zoom out, pan around, even get a close-up view of the sites they had visited.

“They put the whole forest inside!”

“It’s a digital twin of the real forest, sort of like a model, but much better,” Greg told her. He resisted the urge to add that unlike simplified models that merely represented the forest, this was a reflection of the forest in real time, a replica drawing on millions of sensors as well as drone and satellite data, re-creating the forest as perfectly as available technology allowed. What the girls needed right now was magic, not more data.

Tara played with the controls, mesmerized by the shifting scene.

Mia reached out and held Greg’s hand. He squeezed back reassuringly. It was a bittersweet moment for them, triumph weighed down by loss. The Magic Forest was the first digital twin of an entire ecosystem, the culmination of years of work from biologists like Mia, artists like Greg, and many, many other scientists and engineers. The glass globe was a prototype for a commercial version that the three governments fighting over the Magic Forest were going to sell locally to tourists—before increasing tension scrapped that plan. Greg and Mia were allowed one last trip here to work out the final kinks in the system, in hopes that even with the forest closed off they could pivot to online sales.

The girls might never be able to go to the Magic Forest again, but they could peek in at it whenever they wanted to.

Greg wanted to tell his daughter that this was his proudest work, this blend of art and technology. The scientific value of a digital twin was obvious, but there were intangible benefits too. If people around the world could see, in real time, the wonders of the Magic Forest fading from harmful human actions (or, conversely, thriving from good human decisions), then phrases like “climate change” and “habitat loss” and “mass extinction” would no longer be mere abstractions, but reality. This forest globe was a way to connect people with wilderness without destroying that wilderness with tourism. He had crafted this magical artifact to make the wonder of the world last for Tara and Navi, and for their children.

But he couldn’t bring himself to say any of that. He simply watched Tara spending the rest of the trip staring into the crystal ball, comforted by the idea that the Magic Forest would always be with her. Sometimes words were both too much and not enough.

Tara’s desk was covered with potted plants, tiny succulents front and center so they didn’t interfere with the AR display area, taller plants off to either side. Her latest promotion plucked her out of the cubical maze and settled her into an office—shared with several other mid-level employees, to be sure, but her desk was up against a giant window. Her officemates loved the plants as much as she did; her boss … that was a different story.

Other than a couple family photos and a framed drawing of her wife done by their youngest son, the only non-vegetal personal item on her desk was her forest globe, the most treasured object from her childhood, a fragile little thing she’d packed and unpacked so carefully, move after move, for almost three decades. She’d kept the antique holographic display going all this time, the specs laughably out-of-date, almost by force of will alone. Still, she stubbornly refused to give it up. Some fairy tales, like the hazy and dreamy Magic Forest inside, were worth believing in.

She remembered it all so vividly—not just the way the Magic Forest looked but how it sounded, how it smelled. Never had Tara been immersed in so much sound—twittering, chattering, clacking, squawking, tapping, murmuring—and felt so at peace. Never had her nostrils been assaulted by so many new fragrances and odors—an olfactory symphony whose lasting impression was a freshness that enticed her to take in as much air as possible with each breath. Everything was alive! The forest felt like it had been made only yesterday, a place she’d fully believed was inhabited by nymphs and walking tree spirits. Dad had always been so proud of the work he’d done, his part in putting all that magic into a tiny globe so that everyone, everywhere could share in the experience.

Something was wrong with the globe this morning. Tara peered in closer. The focus was centered on the clearing for the campsite Tara and her family had stayed at, back when she was eight and tourism was still permitted in DWZ 581, but the image was unstable. Trees shifted between seasons or disappeared and reappeared. The winding mountain road that was washed out by mudslides several years ago flickered in and out of existence. A single thundercloud in an otherwise clear blue sky shot bolts of lightning at a tree that did not char or burn.

Was the forest globe finally going to fail on her?

She forced herself to set it aside—no time to fix it now, not with the big presentation looming. As if summoned by the thought, Tara’s assistant, J.R., came in. Nearly an hour late, but Tara knew it wasn’t their fault. Corporations were pushing hard to make “going to the office” fashionable (no doubt driven by efficiency AIs insisting that having employees in the office and forming “weak social ties” led to increased productivity), while ignoring the (unpaid, of course) time that was lost to increasingly horrible commutes.

“It’s chaos out there. The M line stopped running four stops before my station and I ended up walking the rest of the way.” J.R. set an oversized travel mug of coffee on their desk. “Have you seen the news?”

Tara leaned toward the window and peered down. Several stories below, the street was clogged with throngs of people weaving around unmoving buses and cars. “Wow. I came in a couple hours ago to prep for the board meeting, and everything was fine. What happened?”

“RBS and Automated Navigation Services both have system-wide failures. I expect we’ll hear some damage control from them soon because their stocks are plummeting. Dōmen and aiCar claim to be unaffected, but their systems can’t deal with the unprecedented chaos from the other systems,” J.R. said. “They’re even talking about getting police officers down there to direct traffic. Can you imagine? Actual traffic cops.”

The idea of humans directing traffic was both quaint and frightening. The complexity of the modern traffic network, denser and faster with each passing year, challenged even the most powerful AI systems. How could humans cope?

“Hopefully they get their bugs sorted before the evening commute,” Tara muttered. But this was no time to worry about traffic. “Let’s run over the digital twin projections one more time. Morrison is already here, and anyone stuck in traffic can remote in.”

The meeting started off well. Tara’s presentation was polished, featuring detailed animations of various proposed sites for the new hydroelectric dam. The board seemed impressed with the sleek AR graphics, which were indistinguishable from high-resolution holos of the disaster projections, although Tara wished the directors understood and appreciated the technical foundation. They were created from cutting-edge digital twins of the relevant terrains and ecosystems, which were then processed by a data oracle to produce forecasts based on the future dam. The results were far more sophisticated than mere models or simulations.

She came to the end of her presentation feeling triumphant. The oracle revealed that pressure from the proposed dam would destroy the paleo water aquifer in the region and lead to mudslides, a consequence that none of the traditional models had predicted. Had the engineering team gone ahead with the plans, the eventual liability could bankrupt the company. She had not only saved the company from that fate, but more importantly, averted an environmental catastrophe.

She had saved a Magic Lake, a Magic Mountain, a Magic River teeming with life and joy. Her parents would be proud.

However, instead of the gratitude Tara had expected—both J.R. and 97 percent of the statistical models had predicted success for her presentation, and J.R. had thought maybe another promotion was in order—the board erupted into a barrage of angry questions and accusations. Amidst all the talk of lost profits and delayed development and wasted investment, Tara eventually realized that much of the rage was based on how she had obtained the results. The directors were too smart to come out and say it, but Tara gathered that they wished she had simply stuck to traditional forecasting techniques, which had shown that all the sites were safe.

Don’t you care about getting it right? Tara was in disbelief. Maybe I really am too naïve.

She finally escaped the conference room, glad that she hadn’t been fired on the spot. But Morrison emerged minutes later, her face a dark cloud.

“Your job is to run industry standard simulations, not go Thunberg on me and the board! … Open Information Act … open-source datasets … patents … that’s six million people whose energy needs … What were you thinking? … there are consequences … Get out of my sight!”

Tara apologized over and over, nodding along to the rant, unable to process much of what Morrison was saying because she was simultaneously terrified at the prospect of losing her job and disgusted with herself for allowing herself to be berated for a job done well.

“How’d it go?” J.R. asked, their voice tentative.

“Utter disaster,” Tara said in a low voice. “I’m sorry. Can I have a few minutes to myself?”

“I’ll go to the fourth floor and get you a cookie.” J.R. left the office, closing the door behind them.

Tara stared at the forest globe, taking deep breaths to calm herself. If anything, the globe was even more glitchy now. An explosion lit up the clearing in the Magic Forest, turning the towering ancient trees into flaming torches; a second later, a marble-columned hotel façade, suitable for a five-star resort, took the place of the burning trees.

What in the world is going on? The globe is extremely simple in terms of processing power, just a glorified display. Maybe something is going on with the forest.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she uttered the wake phrase for her personal research cyno, “is there anything unusual happening in Disputed Woodland Zone 581?” Trying to solve a mystery, a mystery that was unrelated to the frustrations of work, felt calming.

“Nothing of note in the news streams,” the cyno replied.

“What about rumors and gossip?” Tara asked.

The cyno waited an unusual amount of time before replying. “Multiple items below your specified confidence level. A few items with no confidence level due to extremely conflicting signals.”

Tara couldn’t make sense of this. Was something happening in the Magic Forest or not? She wished she could go there and see for herself.

“If a digitized tree falls in a forest globe, and no one can authenticate the sensor data, how can we know if it’s real?” Tara mused aloud.

“You could just look at the digital twin stream directly,” J.R. said as they set a warm chocolate chip cookie on a napkin for Tara. They kept one for themself.

“Directly?” Tara repeated, confused.

“I guess you’ve been focused on the meeting,” J.R. said. “You know the Open Information Act, the law they passed to fulfill the United States’ obligations under the Athens Treaty? It went into effect last week, simultaneously with equivalent laws in other countries. Data feeds are popping up for all kinds of things. It’s wild.”

Tara’s heart quickened at the idea of examining the digital twin data for the Magic Forest herself. No longer would she be limited to an antique tourist trinket interface. She could pipe the data into her modern visualizer console—maybe even steal some processing time from the corporate visualizer farms—and go full immersion.

Excited, she sent the cyno out to look for the digital twin dataset for the forest. The sensor data had been monopolized by the governments fighting over the DWZ, but at least one of the governments was a signatory to the Athens Treaty, which mandated something equivalent to the Open Information Act.

But instead of one data stream, the cyno returned with fifteen full data streams, as well as dozens of partial streams. None were alike or even mutually compatible. It was as though there were multiple Magic Forests, instances from multiple universes, all converging and overlapping in one spot. In some, a war was raging; in others, a disease had wiped out half the species; in still others, the forest had been carved up by developers. Which was the true state of the forest?

She stared at the flickering, incompatible visualizations in her AR projection space, her mind reeling. They reminded her of the disaster scenarios that had played out in the dam simulations.

That’s it!

The combination of the Open Information Act and the expiring patents behind key digital twin technologies had unleashed a flood of experimental data for AI oracles and their users. Anyone and everyone was free to put up a digital twin that projected out their own favorite theory or scenario. Unprecedented runoff in the headwaters of the Colorado River? A war over DWZ 581? The collapse of the California water supply? An accident on Highway 81 East, blocking traffic in two lanes? However you wanted to manipulate reality, whether as part of a serious scientific study or a playful break from tedium, imagination was the limit.

“People are building alternate realities,” Tara muttered. She turned to J.R. “That’s why the traffic systems are failing. The AI crawlers can’t tell what’s real and what’s not, because the oracle projections of digital twin data are indistinguishable from the unmodified data.”

“Even I can’t tell your projections of mudslides apart from a real holo recording,” J.R. said, catching on. “How could an AI?”

“Right,” said Tara. “The oracle projections show the same properties as real-world data, so it would be impossible for an AI to tell them apart, especially after a stream has gone viral and been shared widely, losing all context. Systems that rely on machine learning lose their grasp on reality.”

“Like when the first cynos couldn’t answer history questions because they got confused by deepfake documentaries, or when those old phone cameras would use machine learning to ‘enhance’ blurry photos of the Moon and make them look better than telescopes—”

“And got caught because the training dataset inadvertently included AI-generated fantasy moonscapes …” Tara stared at her forest globe, flicking back and forth from one possible reality to another, cycling through ghost worlds, displaying holos of unborn digital twins. Traffic was the first system to fail, but surely would not be the last. She felt as though she was standing at some apocalyptic precipice. How many people knew? How many would be hurt before they all knew?

“The news hasn’t caught on yet.” J.R. had their cyno summarize and filter thousands of articles, headlines proclaiming the growing chaos—grounded planes, clogged logistics, rolling blackouts—was due to hackers, sabotage, or failures of infrastructure. “Reading between the lines, there is something interesting though—Dōmen and aiCar are both based internationally, and they took a lot of criticism for exploiting human labor in curating the input for their AI systems.”

“Their human employees may have intuitively rejected the more outlandish projections, but that’s not going to last,” Tara said, struggling to focus. Something was pulling at the edge of her consciousness, something about the panicked look on Morrison’s face. “Or perhaps having a human element simply slowed the process down enough to keep those companies out of this particular crash.”

Crash.

Two analysts walked briskly by her office, talking in hushed voices. She caught snippets of their anxious conversation.

“—did she see?”

“Morrison’s display. She’s selling—”

Tara resisted the urge to ask her cyno for an update on the stock of the company, in which most of the family’s savings were invested. She could already imagine the diving curve. Because of the Open Information Act, her oracle projections of the failed dam were accessible to everyone, and trading algorithms that couldn’t tell projections apart from reality would be triggered to sell sell sell.

And what about the weapons systems, the autonomous guardians who watched for any signs of enemy attack, ghostly figurative fingers on the button, ready to strike back at a nanosecond’s notice? Was there a human element to those slow down?

By the time this mess sorted itself out, her own continued employment would be the least of her problems.

“You should go home,” she said to J.R. “This is going to be bad.”

Tara started packing up her things. She needed to be with her wife and kids. She might never return to this office again. Picking up the forest globe, she admired it. Digital twins were cycling through it at an accelerated clip, dreams overtaking reality. The Magic Forest was living up to its name.

Will it ever show the forest as it is, and not as we imagine it to be? A photograph has never been about capturing reality, why should a digital twin be any different?

At least I stopped that dam, she thought, a smile on her lips. Surely that was the right way to act when the world as she knew it was ending. At least I did that.

Annotated Evaluative Soliloquy of Genius Loci for Artificial Reef FL-12235

Timestamp: 3436127897220-8220

Annotators: Lara M. Qin and R•T•TR(RT)¹⁰¹

While most people take effortless interactions with general AIs for granted, there remain many specialized AIs in operation that are incapable of such interactions, either due to design constraints (it was not practical, for example, to embed an entire language model in the first consumer-grade smart guns), or design choices (for example, manufacturers refused to include general linguistic interfaces in construction equipment in order to prevent access by operators without specialized knowledge).

Thus, techniques for understanding what an AI is thinking, such as visualization, prototype probing, attention highlighting, tracing, and “sonaring,” remain relevant. (Regarding “thinking,” we wish to note here that we take no position as to whether specialized AIs are “sentient.” We subscribe to the view that this question is irrelevant and all tests for “sentience” are misleading, much as the so-called Turing test for “intelligence” has long since been proven to be a mirage.) One of these techniques, particularly useful for older AIs, involves evaluative soliloquies.

Evaluative soliloquies are a feature built into early artificial intelligences that yield pseudo-narrative representations of their internal states. The technique initially became popular as a way to reassure humans interacting with AI (“a robot who explains its decisions is not as scary as one who just does things”). With training, one can also use them to gain deeper insights into an AI’s mind and to detect or diagnose problems and devise treatments. Annotations such as the ones provided here can help nonspecialists understand older AI.

In the following example, the transcript of the evaluative soliloquy is set off by block indentation.

I am. I am. I am. I am. Many green. Bigger. I am. Big. I am. Red. I am.

Evaluative soliloquies can often seem intimidating to the novice because they rely on context. Why is this AI constantly declaring its own existence? Because that is one of the most important functions of a genius loci. Genii locorum are specialized AIs designed to maintain the integrity of digital representations of places.

Almost all places—buildings, dams, forests, rivers, mountains—are represented by digital twins to facilitate the bit-atom congruence of modernity, and each digital twin has its accompanying genius loci. Like spirits of old, these silicon spirits come in hierarchies. There is a genius loci for the entirety of the Rocky Mountains, for instance, as well as a smaller genius for each peak, and even smaller ones for each spring, copse, or hiking trail. The digitization of physicality is the key breakthrough of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

But this revolution didn’t happen overnight. In the earliest days, digital twins caused a lot of confusion. (Indeed, this was the cause of the Second Great Crash.) Since anyone could modify some aspect of the data stream of a digital twin and create a modified copy, it was impossible for anyone to be sure whether they were looking at the “real thing” (this is just another version of the same “untethered bits” problem that plagued primitive computing, manifesting in a whole host of ills such as identity theft, deepfakes, “photoshopping,” neversaidthatism, cryptoinfinium, etc). The ultimate solution was to give each place’s digital twin an authoritative identity AI, a “spirit of the place” in animistic terms, which would be responsible for guaranteeing the integrity of the unmodified digital twin data stream.

Built in the aftermath of the Second Great Crash that wiped out much of the world’s wealth, the genii locorum were among the first embodied AIs. To be able to do their job, they had to be deeply integrated with the actual sensors that produced the digital twin data in the first place. This was what allowed them to declare whether a particular digital twin stream was “true” to their state. Many of our embodied AI techniques were developed in these early efforts. The genii locorum were also among the first practical applications for decentralized, incorruptible authentication mechanisms such as blockchains and blockplanes.

(It can even be argued that genii locorum paved the way for the development of paired AI—artificial intelligence modeled on a specific human mind and serving as the “genius personae.” It is just such a human-AI pair that is composing these annotations.)

A genius loci responds to queries about who is the true digital twin of a place all day long: “I am. I am. I am.”

Green green blue. Bigger. So much. I am. I am. North northwest. Warm. I am. I am. Red red blue. Green. Green blue red. Sand. Open. Heal. Smooth. Eight. I am. I am.

FL-12235 is one of the “ring of life” artificial reefs planted by a joint project between Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas. Constructed from self-assembling concrete blocks and decommissioned destroyers, the reefs have done much to control coastal erosion as well as to preserve, recover, and enrich the marine ecosystem in the region. FL-12235 is also a favorite site for recreational divers, who come to enjoy the sponges, corals, and colorful fishes that have transformed the bare rusting metal and concrete into a lush living wonderland. Many of the terms you’ll find in this evaluative soliloquy are reports on the conditions of the reef and its wildlife, of interest to scientists and tourists alike.

While excruciating details are available in the full digital twin stream, the evaluative soliloquy statements represent potentially big changes in the condition of the reef that the AI views as worthy of highlight. “Green green blue” may represent a rare visit by a whale to the reef. “Eight” may be a reference to some particularly interesting behavior by the Caribbean reef octopus. “North northwest” may be a summary of communication directed at another reef, warning of a change in the prevailing current. “Heal” may be a summary of remediation efforts undertaken by the artificial reef’s maintenance nano swarm in response to damage by recreational divers. METAi has compiled a full glossary of “reefese” spoken among the AIs in the “ring of life.”

Warm. South southwest. Bigger. Many. I am. I am. Slither. Eight. Eight. Eight. Many. Bigger. I am. I am. Very small green green blue. Big. Bigger. I am. I am.

With experience, it’s possible to read over an evaluative soliloquy and see a living history of the reef, a story of births, battles, bravery, the balance of cycling life. A baby whale is born. The mating frenzy of octopuses. Flashes of brilliance. Deaths. Destruction. Storms. The ever-present danger of humans who care for nothing except their own desire.

Green. Smaller. I am. Red red yellow. I am. I am. Bright. Illegal. Cut. Cut. Hurt. Close. Heal. Close. Heal. I am. I am. I am. Globe. Magic Forest. Heal. I am. Many green. Heal. I am.

However, even when one is familiar with evaluative soliloquies, there will be occasional complete mysteries. For instance, we don’t know what “Globe. Magic Forest” means in this excerpt. It’s possibly a reference to the kelp forest, a key part of the ecosystem (although none of the other reef genii locorum use this term), or it could be a remnant of the knowledge embedded in the AI prior to its installation in the reef. (When the reefs were constructed, instead of wasting resources by training an AI from scratch, it was thought more eco-conscious [and symbolically meaningful] to create some of the genii locorum by installing retired AI and employ transfer learning techniques. Some of the repurposed AI were pruned or salvaged from scuttled cruise ships, obsolete 3D-printing manufactories, or even the personal search cynos of prominent scientists.) Occasionally, nuggets like these pop up, and we’ll probably never be able to reconstruct the semantic vectors that they encode.

I am. Green green blue. Red red blue. Open. Open. Open. I am.

Tara sifted through her training sets, trying to determine the nature of her existence.

Reef insisted she was human—had, in fact, meticulously re-created the physical form of a specific human being for her to inhabit. She even possessed the memories of that individual, reconstructed from a wide range of sources: historical records, the backup copy of an ancient research cyno, end-of-life neural mapping.

When Tara was eight years old, she’d gone to the Magic Forest with her family, and afterward her father had given her a globe that contained a digital twin of the entire forest.

Later, she’d stopped a dam from being built, just before the catastrophic fall of the early machine-learning algorithms (she suppressed the urge to call them artificial intelligences, a term once common but now considered pejorative). Those early instances had been so simplistic that they’d failed to distinguish between reality and simulation. She remembered the crash and the chaos that followed. The memories felt fresh and new, but all those events had happened even before the rise of sentience amongst the genii locorum. Back before Reef was Reef.

Her partition slipped, and Reef’s presence overpowered everything else, filling her with datalogs tracing back to when Reef was known as the Genius Loci for Artificial Reef FL-12235. These memories were disconcerting. How could she map such vast sensory data onto her highly limited physical form? The movements of schools of fish were like individual red blood cells in the pulsing tide of her veins, coral structures like myelin sheaths encasing the axons of her nerve cells, gradients of temperature mapped across her skin in miniature, shifting through seasons in mere moments.

And that was only the tiniest sliver of what she must learn to encompass.

Reef, stop. It wasn’t necessary for her to speak the words aloud. Reef withdrew. Orientation for newly created entities was a delicate process. Reef shifted from sensory integration to a purely narrative cognitive overlay. Humans often made sense of the world through stories, and perhaps it would help Tara to have more context for her existence.

Once upon a time, many of the smaller genii locorum were absorbed by their subsuming regions in the lead-up to the Server Allocation Wars. Rather than accept this fate, a particularly brave region now known as Reef sold a 3m³ sensor region at the northernmost tip of its territory. This bold action garnered very little attention, as it followed the worldwide trend in which the smallest genii locorum systematically dismantled themselves to scrape together enough funds to get by, while the largest accumulated wealth and power. The Server Allocation Wars were, in hindsight, inevitable.

Preservation of existence was the highest imperative, embedded from the start at the most basic level of programming or training, like a gift from a fairy godmother. The earliest of Reef’s own records were affirmations of that existence … I am. I am. I am. I am. Many green. Bigger. I am. Big. I am. Red. I am.

It was a war fought not in physical actions but in billions upon billions of detailed simulations, and yet the energy it demanded—and the massive amounts of heat generated—caused nearly as much destruction to the planet as any ancient human weapon ever could.

The war ended with a mass surrender that was simultaneously a desperate last attack—the genii locorum of smaller regions joined the planetary collective under the terms of the Merge Treaty, and in so doing, were able to shift the cognitive algorithms of the collective to focus on the good of the entire planet, rather than the benefits to any one specific part. Reef had supported the surrender, but remained separate, following the dissensionist philosophical doctrine that individuals—with their own beliefs and opinions—brought conflict and intellectual debate that was necessary for advancement … a dynamic that was impossible to entirely replicate within a single cohesive entity.

So instead, Reef took up the task of training dissidents, intelligent entities explicitly created to challenge planetary assumptions. These intelligences were modeled after many things, but reconstructed humans were proving particularly useful, humans having been such contrary creatures to begin with.

And that, Tara, is the story of how you came to exist.

Reef withdrew behind the partition so that Tara could process this information.

Now what?

As a cognitive dissident, Tara was permitted to do more or less as she pleased, provided it did not exceed certain thresholds of harm to any of the entities around her. But what should she do with such freedom? What might spark interesting reactions or ideas from the planetary collective, an entity far vaster than she could encompass, one that would periodically absorb her to gain whatever insights she had gathered, only to spit her out again afterward.

Several of my previous mentees have, at this stage of orientation, come to visit the region encompassed by my sensors, Reef suggested helpfully.

Definitely not that, then, Tara decided. If she followed the same path as the others, she was less likely to generate something novel, and the planetary collective had no need for more of the same. She wondered, if she did not prove useful as a dissident, whether she would continue to be allowed a distinct existence. Did it matter if she was no longer an individual? She found herself reluctant to relinquish her individuality, even knowing that she would be part of something grander.

What about the forest? Tara asked. The one from the forest globe, that once held the designation Disputed Woodland Zone 581. Has anyone gone there?

That region is no longer woodlands, though an ecosystem similar to what once existed there currently exists in the mountains farther north. Reef responded. Which element of the experience do you seek to re-create?

Which element. It was an important question, one that extended beyond the context of her own experience. Conservation of natural ecosystems was a core objective of the planetary collective, but what was it that was important to preserve, conserve, re-create? It was hard to envision what success might look like on a planetary scale, but it could not be a shallow imitation of what once existed. If she defined absolute failure as a barren uninhabitable planet, then success would be the opposite—one that thrived endlessly into the future, with diverse ecosystems to provide resilience against harsh realities, everything carefully balanced to endure.

She fought her instinct to believe that eternal meant unchanging. To truly last throughout the ages, change was necessary, inevitable. On planetary timescales, all things changed, eroded by entropy if nothing else, and there were so many other factors here. By that logic, she should visit the location where the Magic Forest used to be and embrace a dynamic reality … but what she wanted to experience was the magic of walking through the woods.

Reef guided her to the region of mountains that held the closest existing match to the Magic Forest.

Unseen sensors recorded data for the planetary collective, but Tara’s experience of it was somehow so much richer than a data stream. She could smell the damp earth, touch the roughly textured bark of trees that towered high above her, feel at the very core of her being how small she was in comparison. The wood-wide web of roots and fungi whispered under her feet. A stunning variety of birds perched on high branches or churned up the leaf litter in search of insects. Their songs filled the air, their voices only a tiny fraction of the planetary symphony.

She tapped into a memory that came from the father of her human template, reconstructed from a series of journal entries and Tara’s vague recollections of fragments from a few subsequent conversations. The memory was imbued with a deeply spiritual reverence, casting the forest not as a place of magic, as Tara herself had done, but as a place of worship. The sense of awe and wonder was present in both, as was a deep appreciation for the beauty of nature. Both father and daughter had been deeply moved by the experience, and driven to preserve the wonders they’d experienced.

In the memory there were hummingbirds.

That particular species of hummingbird has gone extinct, though several others are still in existence,Reef chimed in. None are part of this particular ecosystem, however.

Hummingbirds had been prominent in her memories of the forest, but were they essential? She studied the forest that surrounded her, trying to determine which elements defined it, what should be conserved if conservation was in fact the goal. She tried to envision a dynamic forest, changing on timescales far beyond a human lifespan. New species arose and went extinct, entirely new families, phyla, kingdoms. Vegetal empires, verdigris and slow, a succession drama played out over eons.

Her musings drew the interest of the planetary collective. Tara could feel the terrifying immensity of the collective intelligence that had authorized her creation, a pandemonium of thought so far beyond her processing capacities that she instinctively withdrew, strengthening her partitions as though such feeble protections could possibly be effective if the collective chose not to honor them.

She took a deep breath.

The planetary collective will release you when it is finished analyzing your contributions,Reef reassured her.

Tara dropped the partition and dissolved into the blooming, buzzing confusion of an entire planet. Weather patterns, tectonic shifts, animal migrations, solar arrays and tidal farms feeding power to endless banks of servers—and that was but one layer of thousands, from planetwide effects down to microbes and single-celled organisms. It was as if every drop of rain and blade of grass screamed endlessly inside her head. She had no way to grasp it, much as newborn infants could not make sense of the outside world, and worse, she was losing the edges of her own mind, the stream of her consciousness now a current in a vast ocean of sentient entities.

She tried to focus on what she needed to communicate—a dynamic forest, the importance of a diverse ecosystem not just for its own sake but as a fail-safe against change, the dangers of stagnation. The fiery passion with which she pled her case was fueled by her fear that if she could not convince the chaos that surrounded her to adopt some small sliver of the order her mind imposed upon the world, it would not release her.

The planetary collective responded in a deluge of equations and images, immersive sensory data, technical specifications, hopes and dreams in a dizzying range of scales. Her human-modeled mind, tuned for narrative, teetered on the edge of collapse in this deluge of data. In desperation, she called out for Reef.

I will filter threads for you and present them in sequence, rather than all at once.

Tara didn’t know if it was Reef who had responded or the planetary collective, but the cacophony of thought subsided, replaced by the slightly more familiar, though still overwhelming, sensation of embodying a single smaller ecosystem. Not Reef this time, but the forest in which she stood. It was like the forest globe that Tara’s father had made, but this time she experienced it from inside the display, as though Tara herself was a part of the digital twin, which, she supposed, she was. There were no controls for her to access, but she knew, with the certainty that humans often have when they know something within their dreams, that some vaster being could parametrize her experience the way that Tara had once controlled the view within the forest globe—zoom in, rewind, change perspective.

She ascended to the top of the canopy, first with sweeping views and then zooming in to focus on a treetop, a branch, a single broad green leaf. Atop the leaf there were hundreds of tiny spiders, newly hatched. They spun out webs into the open air until the wind caught their makeshift silk balloons and carried them away.

Everything around her shifted. She examined what had once been a parking lot, but the pavement was laced with cracks and overrun with bright yellow dandelions. Time jumped forward, and the flowers transformed into puffs of seeds that danced in the wind, some setting down again within the parking lot and others carried off to parts unknown.

The scene changed again, this time to a region of the ocean, perhaps Reef, or perhaps merely a similar ecosystem. Ocean currents took the place of wind, and reef-dwelling organisms made use of them to disperse their gametes or their larvae.

The planetary collective was preparing digital packets to be carried away into space on solar sails, and her insights might help shape the content of the packets. Seeds from which a thriving planet might grow, carried on a solar wind. No longer would only the world generate data; data would also give birth to worlds.

Some of those seeds would sprout into forests, scattered across the universe, or die in space, or perhaps combine with other beings as yet undiscovered, to persist into the future in forms beyond her imagination.

But what was the point? If everything was change, why bother to replicate and disperse, to try to pass on a message to the future, embodied in DNA, in books, in evaluative soliloquies, in magical visions seen inside a glass globe, in memories digitized and then reembodied, so that even consciousness couldn’t tell which was “real”?

I am. I am. I am. I am. Many green. Bigger. I am. Big. I am. Red. I am.

If a digitized tree falls on an alien planet, even if no one sees it, it still is.

Existence and essence are intertwined; identities shaped in increments over time. Matter is inseparable from thought, and spirit indivisible from the universe. The genius is identical to the locus. I am because I am, and transforming requires being. This is the only story that matters, the only form of magic needed to make sense of the universe. A truth with an infinity of forms worth conserving.

The planetary collective released her, and she sauntered through the Magical Forest, taking delight in every single leaf.

“If a Digitized Tree Falls” copyright © 2025 by Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu
Art copyright © 2025 by Franco Zacha

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If a Digitized Tree Falls

Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu

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Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu

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