Missing the Trees for the Forest
by Rishi Balakrishnan
@rishi_balakrishnan_
It’s the year 2030 and the electronic communication networks have become saturated—with deepfakes, with bots, with eyes watching. The integration of artificial intelligence into every facet of daily life corroded people’s ability to see the world fully. Nothing was entirely real, so nothing could be entirely trusted. In the summer of 2027, out of defiance but mostly desperation, a group of Brooklynites reneged on a digitally mediated existence and took to the woods. Ditching their phones, laptops, apartments, and city, they fled into the dwindling forests determined to reclaim a sensuous reality.
They left everything—except the Neuralink implants embedded in their skulls. Still pulsing just beneath the skin, they were impossible to remove without surgical extraction, a ghost of the world they had tried to escape.
But the forest was not waiting to be saved. The group arrived with dreams of wild harmony but little understanding. They got sick from eating the wrong berries. Their shelters collapsed in the rain. Their presence frightened the animals. They whispered anxiously at night.
> A shout echoed once. Then nothing.
He ran. Branches tore at his arms.
They tried to recreate the familiar—rigging makeshift comms systems with salvaged electronics—but these too failed in the damp. The forest offered no shortcuts.
Come winter, storms flooded their camp. Lines were washed away. Words no longer carried.
One night, a brother and sister ventured into the woods and were separated in the dark. He yelled for her until his voice gave out. She curled into the hollow of a redwood, afraid to move.
> Her hand brushed the bark. It felt warm.
He pressed his forehead to the trunk, trembling.
Somehow, their Neuralinks, long dormant, routed a signal through the underground mycelial network. The ancient communications of the forest had fused with the residue of human tech. They had stumbled upon a new interface—not one they built, but one they joined.
> A flicker behind his eyes.
A vibration under her palm.
“Avi?”
He didn't hear it, but he felt it.
After finding each other again, the group began to experiment. They learned to send messages not through syntax, but through presence. Touching bark. Syncing breath. Sensing. Each tree had different resonances. Some carried emotion; others amplified urgency. They mapped this not in software but in muscle memory.
But the forest was not passive. It listened back. Each signal required care, reciprocity. They learned to cultivate the ground as part of the message. To tend meant to speak.
Over time, thought slowed. Ego softened. The boundary between sender and receiver blurred. Messages came back altered—softer, refracted, or unexpectedly delayed, like memory itself.
The Neuralink, once a tool for acceleration, became a vessel for attunement. What had been surveillance became communion.
> “Stay there. I’m coming.”
She smiled. She already knew.