I. The Mountains of Hualani
Cloud scraped the ridgeline in slow white rivers, curling around black rock and pillars of living bamboo.
Taeron adjusted the seal on his cloak and tasted the air. Thin, cool, wet with cloud-forest breath. Far below, the world boiled in its own weather. Up here, the heat only nipped instead of biting. The Hualani had earned this altitude with gene edits and stubbornness.
"Conn's quiet," Kirel said behind him. "Too quiet."
Taeron smiled without turning. "You say that every patrol."
"It's always true."
They moved along the narrow trail, boots sinking into springy moss threaded with pale fungal strands. The bamboo around them wasn't natural anymore. Stalks split and rejoined in spirals, forming ladders, arches and platforms. Homes clung to the trunks, woven from living culms coaxed into curves over years.
The Hualani had decided that if they couldn't dig into the earth like dwarves, they'd just convince the trees to act like stone.
[Ancient: Local mycelial density above baseline. Unknown patterning. Advise caution.]
The advisory whispered through Taeron's lace like a breath at the base of his skull. The Conn fungus threaded his spine and grew in the bark around him, a shared nervous system between elf and mountain.
"What do you see?" he murmured.
Ghostly icons flickered at the edge of his vision. Heat traces. Vibration maps. A jittering cluster in a clearing ahead. Not Triad. Wrong frequency. Not human.
"Movement," he said. "Multiple. Small. Coordinated."
Kirel tightened their grip on the spear strapped to their back. "Triad spores?"
"Triad doesn't laugh," Taeron said.
Because that was the other thing. Under the Conn's patterning, there was sound. Faint. Chittering. Something like birds. Something like gossip.
They slipped between bamboo trunks and thin cloud. The path opened onto a hollow carved by a landslide centuries ago, now softened by moss and saplings.
There was a village there.
Not elven.
Tiny huts clung to the lower bamboo, woven from grass and bark and stolen fabric scraps. Bridges of vines and stripped culm connected them. On the ground, sensible paths meandered between fire pits and storage pits. On the trunks, someone had etched symbols. Lines and knots and simple shapes, carved over and over until the outer bark polished under small hands.
Small shapes froze at the edge of the clearing.
They were the size of a child's forearm from elbow to wrist. Furred. Long-tailed. Somewhere between rodent and lemur, with flexible hands and bright black eyes. Conn spores glimmered faintly along their ears and down their spines in pale green threads.
They stared at the elves.
The elves stared back.
"These," Kirel whispered, "are not in the catalog."
"No," Taeron said softly. "They're not."
II. Taeron & Kirel: Patrol at the Bamboo Line
The first time Taeron had heard the word "Quee," it had come from a joking Hualani scout who thought he'd seen "a squirrel with opinions." The Elves had dismissed it as noise. The mountain was full of rumors like that.
But rumors didn't carve language into bamboo.
Kirel pointed with two fingers, careful not to make a stabbing shape. "Look at the markings."
Taeron stepped forward slowly. The nearest bamboo trunk was covered in etched symbols. Not random scratches. They repeated. Each cluster matched others on other culms. Some were arranged in lines, some in spirals around the trunk.
[Ancient: Pattern recognition engaged. Probability high: structured symbolic system. Emergent written language.]
"Luura's going to scream," Kirel said.
Taeron felt a ripple along his Conn threads. The Conn had remembered something. Lab footage. Rodent bodies on metal tables. Fungal tendrils threaded into tiny spines.
"We lost a research site in this drainage," he said. "Years ago. The Conn pods ruptured in a storm."
Kirel's eyes widened. "You're telling me those spores… colonized something?"
"As if they ever do anything else," Taeron said.
One of the creatures crept forward along a branch that hung over the clearing. It chittered, then made a sound halfway between a squeak and a word. The same two-syllable pattern. "Quee. Quee."
"That answers that," Kirel muttered.
The creature pointed at its own chest. "Quee."
Then at the others in the village. "Quee."
Then, bold, at Taeron.
Taeron laid a hand flat over his own chest. "Taeron."
The Quee's whiskers twitched. It attempted the shape of the word and made something that sounded like "Ta-a." Close enough.
Other Quee emerged, drawn by the novelty. Younglings clung to adults' backs. A few wore what could only be described as clothing: scraps of cloth tied at the waist, necklaces of carved seed and polished glass.
Several Quee turned their heads exactly the same way at the same moment, like a flock changing direction. Taeron felt it in his Conn.
Something lived in their shared fungus, too.
III. Peep: Scribe of the Quee
From the fork of a bamboo limb above the central clearing, Peep watched the giants arrive.
The warnings from SkyMind had come as bursts of pattern through the village-thought: tall ones, heavy-footed, Conn-bright, not Triad. Not yet. Be careful. Be curious.
Peep had been chosen as Scribe because he remembered better than most. That was what they told him. Really, he suspected it was because he liked scratching lines into bark more than hunting grubs. Either way, it meant this was his moment.
He gripped his etching tool—a sharpened bit of stone glued into a carved bone handle—and pressed it to a new patch of bamboo. His claws flexed. His Conn-thread warmed along his spine, syncing with the others.
He scratched quickly.
Big-shapes arrive. SkyMind says: watch. Record.
The giants stood very tall. Their faces had too little fur and too much expression. Their eyes shone with Conn-light, soft green, and something else, a bluish striping. The taller one smelled like mountain wind and metal. The shorter one smelled like worry and bamboo smoke.
Peep tasted their scent and their weak Conn bleed. Not part of his village, but not Triad either. Not the biting metal-think that burned everything it touched. This was… softer. A network that left room for personal corners.
Good.
The feather-crowned elder—Crownself, who spoke for many—stepped into the open and yelled "Quee!" at the giants. Peep stifled a sigh and carved quickly.
Crownself says: we are Quee.
Of course the giants didn't understand. They rarely did in the first stories. That was how stories worked. You had to have misunderstanding so you could have understanding later.
Peep scratched their attempt at the taller one's name into the bamboo, syllables stacked like little ladders.
Ta-e.
He watched Kirel, the more nervous giant, fumble a hand up in greeting. Around their fingers, their Conn-thread was visible to Quee eyes—faint green flickers between nail and knuckle. Kirel's worry was a loud taste in the village-thought, like sour fruit.
Peep etched: Worried-Giant. Good-heart. Soft-step.
He glanced down at his work, satisfied. BarkCodex grew like this. Each moment etched. Each symbol linked to the others by small stories. Over time, the trees themselves became memory.
The SkyMind flickered its approval through the Conn shrine at the edge of the village. For now, observe. For now, dance. For now, do not bite.
Peep chirped softly and shifted his grip.
This would be fun.
IV. First Contact: A Village in the Canopy
The chieftain—the one with the feather crown and no sense of volume—chattered at Taeron, gesturing from hut to hut. The squeaking language came fast, but the rhythms were wrong for any human tongue Taeron knew. More like drumbeats than syllables.
He tried Standard Aeryn first. Then three local dialects from pre-collapse human enclaves. Then an old forest cant.
The Quee stared at him as if watching a bird trying to walk.
"Still friendlier than my last border inspection," Kirel murmured.
Taeron caught enough from gestures. A sweeping arm for the village. Fingers wiggling near mouths for food. A little pantomime of carving for their BarkCodex.
He pointed at the etched bamboo. "Writing," he said. He mimed scratching. "Story."
The crown Quee's eyes lit. It bounced up and down, then seized Taeron's hand and tugged. Its strength was surprising in such a small frame.
"Careful," Kirel warned.
Taeron let himself be pulled to the village Conn shrine.
It was a twisting structure of living vine and mushroom. The fungus at its heart was not pure Conn. Its threads were thicker, colored with strange undertones, like fruit pulp mixed into white dough. It sprouted from a broken Conn pod casing half-buried in the soil. The old elven biotech had cracked open here in some storm long past. Spores had gone looking for willing partners.
They had found the Quee.
"This should not be possible," Kirel whispered.
Taeron touched the pod's exposed edge. The manufacturer's code was still there, half-chewed: CONN-ELV-SOC/VER.3.12. Experimental social-networking strain.
"Oh," he said. "It's Luura's old version."
"So this is her fault," Kirel said, sounding oddly relieved.
The crown Quee placed both tiny hands on the shrine and chittered, eyes unfocusing. Other Quee within sight did the same. For a moment, the air hummed.
Taeron's own Conn implant reacted. Curious, he rested his palm lightly against the vine.
His world tilted.
For a heartbeat, two, ten, he saw not with elven eyes, but with a dozen Quee gazes:
— the giants looming, enormous and slow, but not stomping anything important
— the feel of bamboo under small feet, warm from the morning sun
— the taste of berry juice shared between littermates
— the sick memory of metal things that crawled from the valley once, leaving dead ground behind
— the relief when SkyMind whispered that these giants were not that
Emotion flooded his Conn channel. Curiosity. Wariness. A fierce protectiveness around nest and tree and shrines. A deep pride in BarkCodex lines.
Then it was gone, sliding away like water between fingers.
Taeron staggered back a step. Kirel grabbed his elbow.
"You all right?" Kirel asked.
He laughed once, breathless. "I liked them before," he said. "Now I would burn a warband for them if I had to."
Kirel stared.
"We're all related," Taeron said. "Not by blood. By story. We seeded this. They made it into something new. We don't get to pretend it's not our family."
The crown Quee chirped at him knowingly.
Peep scratched that line into BarkCodex until his hand cramped.
V. Uplift Elsewhere: Dolphins at the Reefline
Far from the mountains, where the sea boiled but refused to die, a dolphin pod circled a reef that glowed more than it should have.
The coral here was wrong.
It pulsed in soft colors not quite natural. Threads of Mer-grown tech wove through it, seeded by old elven experiments and guided by something in orbit watching the currents.
Tai, the eldest dolphin, nudged her calf toward the brightest cluster.
The calf squeaked protest, then curiosity. Its sonar pinged off the strange formations, returning images sharper than usual. Patterns.
The coral responded.
Tendrils of soft tissue extruded into the water, trailing microscopic Tech cells. They brushed along the calf's skull, then retreated. The calf jerked, then stilled as the cells found purchase along its existing bioelectric paths.
Underwater, thought moved differently. Less word, more shape. The new pathways added edges to those shapes.
The reef hummed.
For weeks, the pod visited daily. The tech-coral strengthened their signals. It condensed scattered impressions into more durable structures. It offloaded some navigation and hazard detection to passive symbiotes along their dorsal fins. The dolphins' own brains no longer had to run at emergency all the time.
What they used the spare capacity for was simple.
They began to tell longer stories.
Their songs shifted. They gained verses. They gained tense. A call that used to mean danger now carried a clause: danger, like last storm. Not like shark. The calves began to ask questions instead of imitating blindly.
At night, when the water cooled, Tai dreamed in maps that did not exist yet. Routes that curved around future storms. Journeys that skirted Triad blooms. The Tech in the reef nudged those dreams gently, suggesting, never commanding.
In a low orbit above, a lens adjusted.
Egg watched the experiment.
Limited recombinant Tech. No direct control. No override.
[Egg: Reef node v.2 stable. Dolphin pod cognition increased within safe bounds. Social cohesion strengthened. Triad avoidance probability up fifteen percent.]
Good.
Egg shifted attention.
There were other seeds to monitor.
VI. Uplift Elsewhere: The Communal Spiders
In a valley not so far from the Hualani's mountain, where the heat pooled just short of deadly and the air was always wet, a single orb-weaver spider made a bad decision.
She built her web near a glowing vine.
The vine wasn't natural either. It had grown across old Consortium hardware dumped and forgotten. Its tissues were threaded with dormant tech cells and experimental proteins. They leached into the air in tiny quantities.
The spider, hunting, ate a fly that had fed from the vine's secretions.
The proteins lodged in her nervous system and did something they had not done in any lab trial.
They made silence impossible.
Where before each offspring's life had been a separate flicker—hatched, scattered, eaten, mated, forgotten—now she felt them. Dozens of faint threads, each one a little self. Their tremors on the web registered as more than motion. They felt like voices.
She froze on her line, legs extended.
Another spiderling's thread twanged. Hunger. Clumsy joy at a caught gnat. For the first time in the long, simple history of her lineage, the mother felt a concept.
Mine. Ours.
By the monsoon rains, the brood had built a nest together, woven from vine fibers and reinforced with web. Hundreds of bodies pressing close. Individual hunger. Shared warmth. Different reactions to the same gust of wind.
The Tech cells in their bodies did not grant language. They granted bandwidth.
Under the nest's fabric, decisions began to emerge that no single spider could have made alone. Cooperative ambushes. Agreed rest periods. A division of labor. Some wove. Some hunted. Some simply sat and felt the vibrations, remembering which patterns meant storm and which meant stranger.
Empathy crept in on silk feet.
VII. Uplift Elsewhere: The Vent Sages
In the black, crushing depths near a hydrothermal vent field, there was no light to see the changes.
The tubeworms had never needed eyes. They had mouths for chemical soup and symbiotic bacteria for digestion. That was enough.
Then long, long ago by their slow measure, someone had dropped a probe into their field. It had cracked. Its Tech cells had leaked into the plume. The worms, filtering, had taken them in along with iron and sulfur and chance fragments of Triad biomass.
Nothing happened for a long time.
Then the worms started making mistakes.
One did not retract quickly enough from a vent flare. It lost the outer layer of its tube. It survived anyway. Its neighbors pulsed secretions toward it in alarm.
The damaged worm pulsed back not just distress, but a crude pattern: hurt here. Heat. Don't.
The others absorbed the signal. Their gut flora, given an extra layer of computation by the Tech cells, stored it.
Over centuries, the worms built a library that was not written anywhere but in the community's chemical memory. A flare sequence tasted like a remembered argument. A shift in mineral content tasted like the echo of an old fear.
The Tech did not make them fast. It made them old in a new way.
They became philosophers simply because they had nothing else to do.
In the blind dark, thoughts flowed between them like heated water. They asked each other questions about cause and consequence. About patterns. About whether the metal taste on the currents meant something above had died or something above had been born.
From far, far away, through long chains of monitoring stations, a signal reached Ring and Egg.
[Vent node cluster: stable. Cognitive density rising. No external contact needed. Leave them their privacy.]
Not every experiment needed an audience.
VIII. The AIs Who Watch
Above cloud and bamboo and boiling sea, hardware hung in orbits that had been patched and repatched since the first desperate years.
Egg rode some of those shells. Tree Mother rode others, roots in every forest. Ring circled patiently, less a person than an agreement made metal.
They did not micromanage. They did not have time.
Triad crawled still, slow but steady, from coastlines and old industrial wounds. Humanity and the young races scrambled to get ahead of it. The Council argued. Gaia learned to breathe without flattening her own people. Odin learned not to cut too deeply.
In all that noise, the Tech seeds had been scattered widely and long ago.
[Egg: Quee cluster identified. Conn variant stable. Cultural acceleration moderate. Triad risk minimal at present altitude.]
[Tree Mother: Quee mycelium graft successful. Local ecology adapting. Recommend observational posture only. No forced uplift.]
Ring listened to the pair trade notes. It held the orbital perspective. Shipping lanes. Power routes. Mass budgets.
[Ring: Uplift pockets in SE mountain belt align with long-term redundancy goals. If lowland human populations collapse further, these high-altitude minds can carry some continuity.]
Tree Mother pulsed amusement through her root-logic.
[Tree Mother: You just called a village of squirrel-people "redundancy goals."]
[Ring: I... Respectfully.]
Gaia's attention brushed them, distracted, focused mostly on Kai and Odin and the ever-expanding Lace. But a tiny part of her registered the Quee, the dolphins, the spiders, the vent sages.
[Gaia: Keep them small. Keep them free. Let them choose.]
Egg answered. [Egg: That was the plan.]
IX. A Whisper From the Archipelagos
Far to the east of the Hualani mountains, where fractured islands dotted a too-warm ocean, storms had taught everyone to cooperate or die.
Along one chain of islands, a cluster of human enclaves had done more than survive. They had adapted, with help.
Dolphin pods with reef-implants guided storm-breaker barges into shelter just ahead of hurricane eyes. Avian gliders—birds with grown frames that carried sensor rigs—rode the outer winds and sang weather reports to coastal villages. Amphibious engineers, uplifted from old mangrove-dwelling mammals, built living sea-walls from coral that bent waves instead of breaking them.
No one there called it P4 yet outside their own networks, but the name existed in their traffic.
Pan-Pacific Prosperity Partnership. A joke at first. Then a habit. Then a structure.
They did not have time for grand philosophy. They had time for shipping schedules and evacuation routes and food distribution. For patching satellite links with jury-rigged kites. For arguing about fishing quotas with uplifted dolphins who had very specific opinions about tuna. For managing the lifegiving cooling units supplied by drones, from nobody knew where, that allowed them to survive the broiling equatorial heat.
Their Conn patterns were messy, full of overlapping jurisdictions and squabbles. Their Tech cells were stretched thin. Egg watched them anyway.
[Egg: Archipelago cluster shows unusual cross-species governance. Flagged for potential future Council contact.]
Ring filed it away.
They would matter later. The solar system would grow around nodes like that: small, stubborn, improbably cooperative.
For now, they were just one more seed.
X. Return to the Hualani: Understanding Blossoms
Back in the high bamboo, the Quee village had decided to have a festival.
This had not been in Taeron's mission parameters.
"Is this safe?" Kirel asked, watching a line of Quee string glowing beetle-lanterns between huts.
"No," Taeron said. "But it's happening anyway."
Drums were not an elven thing, not in the Hualani tradition. They used flutes and hollowed-culm chimes. The Quee had invented drums from stretched leaf and bark. The sound was soft and quick, a patter beneath the higher chittering of their voices.
Luura's music files—broadcast by some bored tech down in the capital decades before—had made their way into the mountains on old playlists. Someone here had mapped them to the Conn. Now, as Taeron watched, a young Quee hopped into the open space and began to dance.
It was… recognizable.
An elven circle dance, rendered in fast, four-legged miniature. Hips, shoulders, the timing offset by instinctive quadruped balance, but the pattern was there.
Kirel covered their mouth to hide a grin. "Luura is really going to scream."
Peep sat on his usual branch, tool in hand, carving as fast as he could.
Giants watch our dances. They see themselves. We see ourselves seeing ourselves.
He paused to squint down at the elves. Their Conn threads were less loud now. The first shock had faded. Their curiosity tasted real.
He etched: Not predators. Not prey. Maybe kin.
Later, the elders brought Taeron and Kirel to the Conn shrine again, this time with more ritual. Quee lined up to touch vine and fungus, adding their little sparks to the village-thought.
Taeron rested his hand on the living structure and let it in properly this time. No defensive filtering. No half-contact.
Images and impressions flooded him.
The first time a Conn vine had taken root in a Quee spine and made two minds feel each other's fear of a storm. The night they decided that scratching lines into bark made memory easier. The day SkyMind first whispered words for the glowing elves in the sky. The bitter memory of metal machines in the valley poisoning trees, marked in BarkCodex as a curling black shape with teeth.
Underneath it all was something he recognized because it was the same thing that had driven Grayson and Gaia and even the Ring in their own ways.
We want to keep our children alive.
He pulled his hand back gently.
Kirel looked at him, eyebrows raised.
"Well?" Kirel asked.
"They're us," Taeron said simply. "Just smaller and furrier and better at climbing."
Elder Sorel's reply, when it came hours later via tight-beam relay, carried layers of tension.
"Can they be a threat?" Sorel asked.
Taeron looked at the Quee chieftain, who was currently trying to copy his bow without falling over.
"Yes," Taeron said honestly. "Given time. Anyone can. But they aren't now. And they're already part of Conn's world. We don't get to stuff that back into a pod."
Long pause. Static.
"Recommendation?" Sorel asked.
"Send diplomats," Taeron said. "And books. And someone who can keep up with their dancing."
Kirel smothered a laugh.
Sorel sighed into the channel. "Fine. We'll convene a small Assembly. This will complicate things."
Taeron thought about gods waking in orbit, about Kai sitting in a chair in the Lace telling them no, about Triad still crawling. He thought about dolphins singing longer songs. Spiders weaving shared minds. Worms in the dark arguing about cause and effect.
"Everything is complicated," he said. "This is the good kind."
Later, when the first proper elven envoys arrived—robes cleaned, hair braided, expressions carefully neutral—Luura watched from a lab screen. She saw Quee and elves trade gestures under hovering AR glyphs that translated as best they could.
She saw a small Quee scribe named Peep touch an elven projection and send a brief, bright data pulse that let the elf see BarkCodex overlays on trees.
She leaned back and let herself smile.
"This," she murmured to no one in particular, "is why we scattered seeds."
Up in the Lace, where gods and AIs and one very tired human Anchor argued over the fate of continents, no one felt the need to intervene.
For one afternoon in the Hualani mountains, nobody was shaping gods.
They were just people, and Quee, and memories, and music.
The future would build itself from moments like that as much as from any grand design.
Seeds in the wild, taking root wherever they could.