Please.
If anyone can hear this… Anyone at all…
Help me.
My name is Sylvia, and something’s gone wrong. Terribly wrong.
I don’t know how it happened. They said the Procedure was foolproof. They said I wouldn’t even know it was happening, that I wouldn’t even feel the change.
They said the darkness would wash over me slowly like the rising tide, and I’d be gently rocked to sleep by the faint humming in my mind.
Yes, the Procedure was experimental, but the science was all there. It was only a matter of rearranging our molecular make-up and restructuring our DNA -- stuff we’d been doing for years. It had just never come to the point where we needed to sacrifice some of our own for the sake of survival.
They should have done this years ago, before it became a desperate race to beat Mother Nature to the grave, before we held the fate of humanity in our hands. They could have saved us all with any effort, back when plants could survive to germination and we could still postpone problem-solving until “someday.”
I guess they just thought that day would never come.
I wish so desperately they had been right.
As the only substantial organic matter left on earth, humans were the single means of achieving this restoration. I was created to become one of the first Arboria. My mother was selected for her near flawless genetic history and my father for his fertility, an imperative trait to have when trying to replant the earth. I was conceived in a test tube and incubated alongside the 49 other Arborial “podlings,” a charming nickname given to us by the botanists and geneticists who were an ever-present entity in our lives.
Instead of a formal education, I became the subject of an intensive study about the genetic composition of the human body. I would spend seven hours a day, five days a week at the lab and the rest at home being raised by my surrogate parents who were chosen for their nurturing and compassionate predispositions.
I was never frightened at the prospect of becoming a tree. The way I saw it, I was better off than most of the other humans I knew. The transformation couldn’t occur until our bodies had reached physical maturity and we stopped growing, which meant I had at least nineteen years of staying warm and fed and safe, a luxury not shared by many others. In return, I simply had to surrender my body upon adulthood, with the promise that I would be saving humanity for centuries to come.
I rarely socialized as a child or even into my teenage years. We had been conditioned out of emotions like love at a young age; the only people with whom I interacted were my guardians, the doctors at the lab, and the other podlings, the lattermost of which occurred not through conversation but rather the frequency which with we occupied the same space at the same time. The only truly meaningful relationships in my life existed in black type on yellowing paper with people whose faces and voices were nothing more than a product of my hyperactive imagination.
My mother taught me how to read at a young age so that I would have something to occupy my time during the hours that I spent being poked and prodded. With books passed down through her family for generations, she opened my life to the world of words. I know that reading is an antiquated process now that everything exists in downloadable memory files, but I’ve always preferred unwrapping the stories delicately, watching them unfold and unfurl in my mind’s eye. Furthermore, loving literature as I had grown to, I could never help but appreciate the poetic irony that resided in my passion for these books that were created carelessly from billions of trees that human lives like my own are now being sacrificed in an attempt to recreate. Feeling the pages turn beneath my fingers was utter bliss, filling my head with visions of a world where once again, because of my sacrifice, such immortally beautiful words could be given the leather bound crypts they so rightfully deserved.
When I turned sixteen I was given the opportunity to choose (from a carefully predetermined list) the type of tree I was to become. I sat down with my mother and pored through the choices, weighing the pros and cons of each selection. Even though I was only really being given the chance to pick my own poison, it still took me two weeks to reach my decision. I finally settled upon Morus rubra, the red mulberry. I admired its strength and durability and delighted in the prospect of someday producing lush, decadent berries.
It wasn’t until my 34th year post-Procedure that my limbs finally bore fruit.
The Procedure was set to take place on April 21 of our twentieth year, a day that once used to celebrate trees and other assorted flora. They were to rename it Arboria Day to commemorate our sacrifice for the human race. As I took my place alongside the others in the greenhouse, I was at peace; I was prepared to die. I had lived hundreds of lives and taken countless adventures with friends who returned home every night to their places on my shelf and were always there when I’d awake in the morning. I had known nothing but comfort and affection. The only hardships I had experienced were always neatly resolved within the span of several hundred pages, no ends left untied.
Gazing out across the sea of onlookers, I tried my hardest to commit each face to memory. My whole life has existed so they and their loved ones could be saved. They will tell their children of my sacrifice and my name will be on the tongues of every man, woman, and child for generations to come.
I laid on the table and relished the pain of that final needle as it pierced my skin; I was glad my last sensation would be a strong one. As my eyes slowly closed, I felt the sweet relief that I always knew would come with death. My consciousness ebbed and flowed… I felt a smile softly kiss my lips… The world went dark.
I awoke later to the worst terror that I had ever known. It took almost a full year for me to understand my fate, and another dozen to resign myself to it.
I now exist trapped inside of this tree… of a book whose pages have yet to be written. I am forever encapsulated in this wooden sarcophagus, isolated from the world I once gave myself to save with the promise that I would cease to exist: mind, body, and soul. Never in my worst nightmares did I foresee this stasis… this sentient captivity with nothing but the crushing weight of darkness to constantly remind me that I will spend the rest of eternity, should I continue to thrive, left silently screaming inside my own mind.
By my account of the changing seasons, it’s been 128 years since I was changed. As a child, I remember how eternal each minute felt when I was left with my attention unoccupied. I’d watch the second hand move agonizingly slowly and be certain that every third tick was somehow slower. I was convinced that time would eventually slow so greatly that it would stop altogether. Now, I feel completely removed from the passage of time. Hours and years have become indistinguishable as the months and the seasons all blend together into a blur.
I’ve been repeating this story to myself for so long now that it no longer feels like a part of me while simultaneously remaining the only truth I can remember. I wish I knew if it worked; I wish I knew if we had saved them. Even if the human race isn’t extinct, everyone I’ve ever known has been dead for years, their spirits released into the void and their souls finally at peace.
And I?
I will continue to survive as long as there is an earth to support me. It had been made clear that our self-sacrifices would never be forgotten: our trees, should they survive, would be treated with sanctity and reverence. They would never be cut down.
I will never be cut down.
My only hope is that, by some miracle, someday someone somehow will be able to hear my pleas for help and I will finally be able to disappear from consciousness permanently.
Until that day, all I can do is wait and hope and pray for the impossible.
Until that day, all I can do is repeat:
Help.
Please.
If anyone can hear this… Anyone at all…
Help me.
My name is Sylvia, and something’s gone wrong. Terribly wrong.